From a shared phone to a WhatsApp channel their travellers trust

Who they are

The Camino de Santiago is one of those routes people plan their year around. TeeTravel has been planning it since 2001, as a pioneer and specialist in the route and as an inbound tour operator: it does not sell trips abroad, it takes travellers arriving into Spain and Portugal and builds the route around them.

Everything it sells is tailor-made: routes reshaped stage by stage, with the hotels, private transfers, guides and support vehicle required. More than 40 staff and over 3,000 local partners across Spain and Portugal support that work, for thousands of travellers across the five continents. 2027 is a Xacobeo Holy Year, and the team expects to match or beat those numbers.

Their customers moved to WhatsApp before they did

At first, WhatsApp was only for travellers already on the route: transfer times, a hotel they could not find, documents to resend. Then customers stopped using email altogether. Many said so directly: nothing reaches me by email, can you send it on WhatsApp instead? TeeTravel added a WhatsApp button to its website, and most new enquiries started arriving there.

The problem was how those messages were handled:

• Everything ran on a standard WhatsApp account, with 20 to 40 messages arriving every day.
• Whoever had the account linked at the time was the person answering, and it kept changing.
• Passing a conversation to a colleague meant one person unlinking, the other linking the device and registering again before anyone could reply.
• Nobody could assign a conversation or see who was handling it.
• Nothing reached the CRM: the whole pre-sale conversation stayed outside it, and leads were typed in by hand.

Bots that decide who gets answered first, and a CRM that sees the whole conversation

TeeTravel went looking for a connector that could do two jobs: manage the conversations, and feed the CRM with all the data without getting in the way of sales. As a Meta Business Partner and WhatsApp Business Solution Provider, we covered both. Reinicia, one of our partner agencies, built the chatbots with them. That collaboration mattered, because nobody in the marketing team had worked with chatbots before.

Three changes transformed the daily work:

• The chatbots sort the queue before anyone opens it. A virtual assistant greets the traveller, identifies itself as a bot, and asks what they need: a new quote, a question about a booked trip, or a general enquiry. It guides them to a clear close, logs the enquiry, and an advisor takes it from there. That first answer tells the team who they are talking to, so they can decide how much attention each enquiry deserves. TeeTravel set the order themselves: people about to travel first, then people who want to travel, and general enquiries last.
• The shared inbox replaced the linked phone. Every agent works from their own computer, with their own assigned folder, and conversations are passed on with a note about what the traveller needs. One or two people now cover WhatsApp as the front line and escalate to the advisors and the bookings team once an enquiry is qualified.
• The CRM integration creates leads and opportunities automatically. The conversation history stays in the CRM, so anyone can open a contact and see what they asked, what they were quoted, and whether they ended up booking.

What customers say

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