In a tailor-made travel agency, the value lies in the advisors' expertise and the quality of what they prepare. Anything that pulls them away from it (retyping contact details, proofreading travel guides, waiting for an outside agency to update the website) costs twice: in direct spend, and in time not spent with the customer.
With the travel market flat at the time of the project, the goal wasn't to sell more but to operate better. That was the starting point of the work with Cercle des Voyages: finding the tasks where time is lost without producing anything.
The starting point: inherited, fully manual processes
The agency's internal processes had built up layer by layer. Manual from start to finish, they cost time, invited copying errors and weighed on operating costs.
The assessment came before any technical decision: the aim was to find where the effort was real and the result was nil.
- Modernize internal processes that had become too heavy and time-consuming.
- Cut operating costs and improve profitability.
- Improve the quality and speed of website content updates.
- Free up the teams' time for high-value work.
Three agents, three bottlenecks
Rather than one general-purpose assistant, three separate agents were designed, each tied to a specific moment in the work.
The SEO agent
It made it possible to overhaul the website's SEO: optimized content, regular updates, better online visibility. The agency stopped depending on an outside provider to evolve its pages.
That's where the €70,000 comes from: not a theoretical productivity gain, but an agency expense that is no longer incurred.
The handwritten form reader, on the marketing side
Forms filled out by hand become structured data. Before, an employee typed in participants' phone numbers and email addresses one by one; that task is gone, and with it the equivalent of a full-time position. This is lead capture: those contact details feed marketing instead of sitting on a paper form.
It's the kind of automation that doesn't show in a product demo, but that the team concerned notices from the very first week.
The travel guide checker, on the procurement side
It's a document-checking agent, like the ones that review a contract or an invoice in procurement: it checks the travel guide for accuracy, consistency and editorial quality, a document the high-end customer reads line by line.
Its gain hasn't been quantified yet: the review time saved remains to be measured. That's why this agent doesn't appear in the results below, even though it runs just like the other two.
