SchuVar Tours Shortens Sales Cycle by 60% Across 8 Branches

SchuVar Tours is a wholesale travel agency with eight branches across Nicaragua, offering local and international travel services. Its skilled team of agents guide clients through every step to book their perfect vacation. Their mission: To design dream trips and become the leading travel agency in and beyond Nicaragua through trust, innovation, and top-tier service.

The problem

SchuVar Tours had all the ingredients for success—a massive Facebook following of over 100,000, compelling Meta ads, and a clear call to action: Message us on WhatsApp to book your trip. Leads flowed in steadily, curious travelers eager to discover their next getaway. But without a lead management system in place, the business struggled to engage leads while interest was high.

With agents spread out across branches and handling multiple channels, leads often went overlooked or were left hanging for hours or days. There was no clear assignment process, so agents simply had to pick up the leads that they saw. This meant missed opportunities as prospects who received slow replies or none at all went elsewhere.

The business wanted to close more deals, faster, while keeping agents aligned on priorities and evenly distributing the workload.

The respond.io solution

SchuVar Tours decided to try respond.io as a way to bring conversations from multiple channels into a single inbox, improve lead follow-ups and turn leads into paid bookings.

It connected all its channels, including WhatsApp API, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, email and webchat to respond.io to get all contacts and conversations in one place. By leveraging automation, it streamlined the entire customer journey and increased conversions. Here’s how they did it.

Collaborate more effectively with a team inbox

First of all, uniting agents across branches and channels into a single team inbox with respond.io made it easier to organize customer communication. There was no need for agents to juggle multiple apps or wonder who was handling what conversation.

Internal comments also helped agents stay aligned on context when handing over a conversation or if they need to ask advice from a supervisor.

Streamline the booking process with automated replies

To ensure leads aren’t kept waiting and to speed up the booking process, SchuVar Tours set up automated responses with respond.io’s Workflows. The auto replies collect basic information about the lead’s interests and inform them about agent availability, saving agents time and managing customer expectations.

Auto-assign conversations to agents for faster service

After gathering information, the lead is then automatically assigned to the next available agent. The business uses a round-robin format to assign customers to available agents in turn so the workload is evenly distributed.

With this system in place, agents can respond promptly and focus on closing deals.

Scale meta click to chat ads to increase new leads

With more efficient processes in place, SchuVar Tours had the capacity to handle more leads, so it ramped up its advertising, tripling the number of leads it receives via paid ads.

Respond.io integrates with Meta click to chat ads so all ad responses indicate which channel and ad the conversation came from, showing which ads are attracting quality leads. With reports and analytics, the business can measure ad performance to ensure all marketing investments translate into revenue impact.

Implement lead status tracking through the funnel

Additionally, respond.io’s Lifecycle feature enables SchuVar Tours to manage each lead throughout the entire customer journey, so agents get instant context on each customer and can prioritize those with high intent.

For instance, they recognize a lead who has received a quote is closer to purchase than a lead sending a first inquiry, so they attend to the former first. As a result, they have shortened their sales cycles for faster bookings.

Once the customer makes a payment, the agent updates their status accordingly. This makes it easy for the business to track the number and speed of deals closed. It also helps identify existing customers, who are later retargeted with WhatsApp promotional broadcasts.

”Thanks to respond.io, at SchuVar Tours, we optimized our internal organization, reduced response times, and improved the customer experience with more efficient management based on accurate metrics.” - Esmeralda Sevilla, Deputy Manager of SchuVar Tours

The results

By streamlining its sales process and gaining full visibility of the customer journey—from chat initiation to payment—SchuVar Tours has reduced delays and increased conversions for a 60% faster sales cycle.

Since implementing respond.io, SchuVar Tours has improved response times by automating customer detail collection and prioritizing high-intent leads. Agents are collaborating efficiently in respond.io’s team inbox so no lead goes overlooked and everyone has full context. This has resulted in a nearly 100% follow-up rate.

As the business now has the capacity to manage higher volumes of ads, it’s been able to scale its click to chat ads and generate 40% of its leads from paid ads, a 3x increase over three months. These improvements have transformed SchuVar Tours’ sales operations—turning what was once a fragmented, manual process into a high-performing, scalable engine for growth.

Want to see similar success for your business? Contact us for a free consultation today.