In tour sales the customer's question almost always has the same shape: a departure city, a destination and a date range. "Do you have a Cappadocia tour from Izmir, early October?"
Turning that sentence into the right result depends less on the agent's intelligence than on how the catalogue data is organised.
Where is the departure city written
In most tour catalogues the departure city is not its own field; it is embedded in the category name or the tour title: "Cappadocia Tours Departing Izmir".
The result: the agent searches for "Izmir" in tour titles, finds nothing, and says "there are no tours from Izmir". The tours exist; they are simply written in another field.
The first job in a deployment is to measure which field holds the departure information. Not guess: opening a few tours and inspecting the fields saves hours of wrong diagnosis.
The searched field and the displayed field can differ
A similar trap appears with destinations. The tour title is written in marketing language — "Magical Cappadocia" — and contains no route information. The route sits in a separate description field.
If the agent searches only titles, it cannot see half the catalogue. The right design states explicitly which fields are searched: title, description, category and route.
Defining synonyms
Customers do not use catalogue words. Someone saying "a Black Sea tour" means Trabzon, Rize and Ayder; someone saying "the Aegean" means Cesme and Bodrum.
Building a geographic synonym list is the single change that most improves conversion in this channel. The list need not be long; the fifteen most-asked region names cover most catalogues.
Date flexibility
Dates in tour sales are usually flexible. A customer saying "early October" should be shown tours on 1-5 October, but the 8 October departure should be offered as an alternative.
Strict date matching produces "there is no tour on your dates" and the call ends. Flexible matching produces "not on those dates, but there are two options the following week" and the call continues.
Price and capacity
Tour prices vary by party size, room type and departure point. A single price quoted by the agent is usually wrong.
The right behaviour: quote a starting price ("from 8,900 TL per person") and collect what is needed for an exact one. Capacity must also be queried live; directing a customer to a sold-out departure is the most expensive mistake.
After the call
Tour sales do not close in one call. The customer hears the price, consults their partner, thinks for a few days. That makes sending a written summary especially valuable in this sector: tour name, dates, price and what is included.
A short follow-up call three or four days later is then the highest-returning step in the whole sales operation.
A note for the team
Most cases where a tour assistant answers wrongly come not from missing data but from a rule in the instructions contradicting the reality of the catalogue. If a rule says "do not suggest alternatives when no tour is found", the agent cannot behave correctly. When investigating a wrong answer, read the instructions first and the catalogue second.
Tomorrow we look at dealer and franchise networks: recognising that the caller is a dealer.