Gen25 helps Boat Bike Tours build an Agentic AI workforce
One of Europe’s most popular providers of cycling-based holidays, Boat Bike Tours faces a highly seasonal business. Dealing with the peak workload has always been a struggle, but with the help of a new AI workforce and consulting partner Gen25, the Amsterdam-based company has been able to redefine how it operates to the benefit of its customers and staff.
Established in the 1990’s, Boat Bike Tours has turned a typical Dutch mode of transport – cycling – into a popular holiday segment. Through Boat Bike Tours, customers can book cycling holidays with accommodation, often in combination with a boat tour, turning cycling and sailing into one seamless adventure.
The company offers tours in 15+ countries, including a tour by bike and boat in the Netherlands, a sail and bike tour through Tuscany’s picturesque landscape, or even a tour from Hanoi to Ho Chí Minh City in Vietnam.
While Boat Bike Tours is known for its idyllic holidays and ability to curate a smooth experience, managing this kind of operation at scale is anything but simple – especially during the peak months when interest skyrockets.
Every year, Boat Bike Tours receives roughly 12,000 quote requests from travelers. A significant portion of these inquiries come in a short time frame. In such periods, handling thousands of booking inquiries during a compressed seasonal rush poses a major logistical challenge.
To provide some context to the challenge – processing each quote takes around 15 minutes, as staff have to compile data from different systems to create suitable offers.
Enter Agentic AI
With Boat Bike Tours growing to 18,000 guests per year, that challenge became a serious burden. Beyond internal logistics and staffing, the time-consuming process also led to slower customer response times, delayed bookings, and inefficient use of ships, cabins, and services.
That’s when the company turned to Gen25 for guidance. Known for its expertise in intelligent automation and AI solutions, Gen25 advised Boat Bike Tours to adopt an Agentic AI workforce. Agentic AI is a technology that mimics human employees, capable of performing tasks (automation) and more importantly, make independent decisions and take actions to achieve goals (autonomous AI) with minimal human supervision.
“Agentic AI enables software to act more like an intelligent agent – observing data in real-time, understanding context, making decisions, and taking actions accordingly. For Boat Bike Tours, this meant a smarter, more responsive quoting process powered by real-time insights and automation,” explained Joris van Wessem, who led the Gen25 team on the engagement.
Over the course of a few weeks, Gen25 designed and implemented Agentforce. Built on Salesforce and leveraging its Data Cloud capabilities, Agentforce introduced a completely new way of working. For example, quote requests now no longer have to be handled from scratch, as the system is capable of pulling up up-to-the-minute information on available ships, cabin configurations, bike options, and additional services.
Based on the customer’s preferences, Agentforce creates a tailored proposal, which can then be reviewed and adjusted by staff before being sent to customers. Instead of the hours this used to take, this process is now completed in minutes.
Staff of Boat Bike Tours now enjoy a fully integrated approach to client management, with the system bringing together all customer and product information into one central place. This centralization has accelerated internal workflows and also allows for more personalized recommendations, resulting in a more satisfying booking experience for travelers.
The results
The adoption of Agentic AI has so far been transformational for the Dutch company. A grasp of some of the benefits: the time to process quotes has gone down from 15 minutes to 6 minutes, the percentage of quotes that can be sent to customers automatically can be improved to 60%, while service standards are lifted.
“What was once a pain point during the busiest months of the year has now become an opportunity to deliver and stand out in a competitive holidays landscape,” said Van Wessem. “We are delighted to have been able to contribute to the further growth and efficiency of Boat Bike Tours through smart technology.”
Looking ahead, Boat Bike Tours sees this shift as more than a seasonal fix. The company is broadening the application of Agentforce’s intelligent automation to help automate other parts of its operations and scale its business.
