App AI Automation Site Travel & tours
Cheeky Kiwi Travel
A small-group tour operator in New Zealand. We replaced a WordPress site that took 10 seconds to load with a custom booking platform connected to Rezdy, their booking system. The conversion rate rose, and online bookings doubled.
- 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, but the website did not match. It ran on WordPress with the plugin for Rezdy, their booking system. A tour page took ten seconds or more to load, the design was dated, and visitors left before the booking calendar appeared. Every booking still had to go through Rezdy, so the answer was not another WordPress theme. It was a site that connects to Rezdy properly.
Behind the scenes, every afternoon someone spent three hours turning the day's bookings into headcounts and emails for more than fifteen suppliers, by hand.
What we built · 01
A booking platform connected to Rezdy.
We built a custom platform with SvelteKit. Tour pages and articles are built ahead of time from Sanity, the editor their team writes in, so they load before Rezdy is even asked. Availability and prices then load in from Rezdy behind them, two months at a time. Our own cart holds several tours and departures at once, gives live prices, 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. Card details go from the visitor's browser straight to Stripe, under Rezdy's own account, so no card detail ever touches the site.
Rezdy stays the master record for tours. When a tour changes there, an automatic update copies it into Sanity, and the team edits everything else in Sanity. A second brand, Crew Adventures, runs on the same code, with its content stored in the same place.
What we built · 02
The 3pm supplier emails, drafted by an AI assistant.
Bookings are copied from Rezdy into a staff tool as they come in. Each afternoon the tool groups tomorrow's passengers by supplier, applies each supplier's rules (cut-off times, capacities, seasonal allocations) and has Claude, an AI model, draft every supplier email. Staff read, adjust and send them, and every email is logged. A job that took three hours is now a review.
Staff can also ask the tool about bookings in plain English: how many passengers tomorrow, which bookings have dietary notes, what extras are on Thursday. It only answers from live data it looks up, and does its sums with a calculator rather than guessing.
The latest TripAdvisor reviews are copied 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. It took 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. It put them to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, and scored the answers 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 we checked can read the site, and our technical scan scored it 92 out of 100. The audit also found the gaps: comparison and cost questions the tour pages do not answer yet. It set out what to do about them.
What changed
The numbers.
2×
online bookings
against the same month on the old WordPress site
+37%
conversion rate
visits 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
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
No lock-in.
The platform runs in Cheeky Kiwi's own accounts, connected to the Rezdy account they already use. Bookings, payments and availability stay in Rezdy, where they already were. Only the website customers see and the staff tool behind it changed.
- SvelteKit
the site, the cart and the staff tool
- Rezdy
tours, availability, bookings and payments, connected live and kept in sync
- Sanity
the editor for both brands, with a button that rebuilds the site
- Cloudflare
hosting, plus small programs that handle Rezdy updates, the TripAdvisor reviews shown on the site, and rebuilds
- Supabase
the copy of the bookings, and staff logins
- Claude
drafts supplier emails and answers booking questions, using only live data it looks up
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