App AI Automation Site Travel & tours
Cheeky Kiwi Travel
A small-group tour operator in New Zealand. We replaced a 10-second WordPress site with a custom booking platform on Rezdy, and the conversion rate followed.
- Client
- Tour operator, New Zealand
- Industry
- Travel & tours
- Shipped
- 2025
- Live at
- cheekykiwitravel.com
Before
Ten seconds to load, on the page people book from.
Cheeky Kiwi runs some of New Zealand's most popular small-group tours. The site did not match: WordPress with the Rezdy booking plugin, ten seconds or more to load a tour page, a dated design, and visitors bouncing before the calendar appeared. Every booking still had to go through Rezdy, so the answer was not another theme. It was a site that talks to Rezdy properly.
Behind the scenes, every afternoon someone spent one to two hours turning the day's bookings into headcounts and emails for more than fifteen suppliers, by hand.
What we built · 01
A booking platform on the Rezdy API.
A custom platform on SvelteKit. Tour and editorial pages are pre-rendered from Sanity, so they load before Rezdy is even asked. Availability and pricing stream in from the Rezdy API behind them, two months at a time. A cart of our own holds several tours and departures at once, quotes live, takes vouchers and coupons, and offers the rest of a package when part of it is in the cart. That is where the second tour gets sold. Cards are tokenised in the browser with Rezdy's own Stripe key, so no card detail ever touches the site.
Rezdy stays the source of truth: a webhook keeps every tour in sync with the CMS, and the team edits everything else in Sanity. A second brand, Crew Adventures, runs from the same codebase and dataset.
What we built · 02
The 3pm supplier run, drafted by an AI admin.
Bookings mirror from Rezdy into a staff tool as they land. Each afternoon it groups tomorrow's passengers by supplier, applies each supplier's rules (cut-off times, capacities, seasonal allocations) and has Claude draft every supplier email. Staff read, adjust and send, and every email is logged. A one-to-two-hour job becomes a review.
The same tool answers booking questions in plain English: how many passengers tomorrow, which bookings carry dietary notes, what extras are on Thursday. It can only answer from the live data it fetches, and it does its arithmetic with a calculator, not by guessing.
After the trip, guests get one question. Five stars sends them straight to TripAdvisor; anything less goes to a private form first. The latest reviews sync back to the site every day.
Measured · Sep 2026
Named in 43% of AI answers.
In September 2026 we ran our AI Visibility Audit on Cheeky Kiwi: 40 questions its customers ask, from who runs small-group day tours to Hobbiton from Auckland to what to do when the Milford Sound weather turns, put to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, and scored against five competitors.
Cheeky Kiwi was named or linked in 65 of 153 answers, 43%, almost four times the nearest competitor at 11%. Its own site was the most-cited source in those answers, 58 times, ahead of Viator and TripAdvisor. Every AI crawler checked can read it, and the crawl scored 92 out of 100. The audit also found the gaps, comparison and cost questions the tour pages do not answer yet, and what to do about them.
What changed
The numbers.
+37%
conversion rate
sessions that book, 1.83% to 2.51%; per visitor, 2.33% to 2.94%
43%
cited in AI answers
named or linked in 65 of 153 answers to its customers' questions, nearest competitor 11%
+15%
cross-sell
1.18 tours per booking, up from 1.03, the second one sold in the cart
<2s
page loads
down from 10 seconds or more on the old site
2
brands, one codebase
Cheeky Kiwi and Crew Adventures share the platform and the CMS
Conversion and cart figures compare the old site with the new one, published with Cheeky Kiwi's permission. The AI answer figure is from our AI Visibility Audit of 23 September 2026.
Runs on
Theirs to keep.
The platform lives in Cheeky Kiwi's own accounts, integrated with the Rezdy they already run. Bookings, payments and availability stay where they were; only the site in front of them, and the admin behind them, changed.
- SvelteKit
the site, the cart and the staff tool
- Rezdy
tours, availability, bookings and payments, through the API and webhooks
- Sanity
content for both brands, with a rebuild button in the studio
- Cloudflare
hosting, plus workers for the Rezdy, TripAdvisor and rebuild hooks
- Supabase
the booking mirror and staff logins
- Claude
supplier emails and the booking chat, tool-bound to live data
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