Eight bases and a counter at breaking point
Grupo Marina Jets rents jet skis and sells water activities across eight bases in the Mediterranean. In August the bottleneck isn't the fleet, it's people. Someone has to answer WhatsApp, quote the price, fill in the contract, check the ID and log every passenger in the register. Multiply that by eight bases and by the busiest month of the year.
of counter and WhatsApp work nobody did in August. That's three full-time people they didn't have to hire, train or fit into an August rota.
It sells with the base closed
The eleven-at-night enquiry is the one most often lost and the cheapest to win: the customer is planning tomorrow and messaging three places at once. At Grupo Marina Jets, the first reply is theirs.
for the AI to reply. A person takes 1h50 on average. At night the agent takes 70% of sales turns; across the whole day, 60%.
In August it closed 34% of conversations by itself, and 57% of the bookings it creates get paid without anyone on the team writing a line: the counter finds out once they're already charged. Over the season it multiplied by four the bookings it opens on its own.
The customer does the counter work
The paperwork doesn't disappear, it changes hands. The contract gets signed on the customer's phone, before they arrive or at the pontoon, and boarding is settled with a scan that fills in the register by itself.
And it chases what goes cold
Three out of four conversations go cold: the customer asks, gets the price and disappears. Solnow picks them back up after three hours of silence, with the price and the payment link, and carries on if they reply.
| No follow-up: returns / books | With follow-up: returns / books | |
|---|---|---|
| Went quiet before getting a price | 9% / 2% | 28% / 9% |
| Went quiet with the price given | 15% / 4% | 28% / 14% |
| Went quiet with the payment link in hand | 31% / 9% | 78% / 32% |
out of the thousand-plus conversations that go cold every month. It's the gap between the 31% who come back on their own and the 78% who come back when a follow-up arrives with the payment link.
