AI-powered route search for Direct Ferries
Firney developed a scalable AI assistant in just 15 weeks, featuring an intuitive route discovery system that allows customers to effortlessly explore travel options—even when they’re unaware of specific port names.
AI-powered route search for Direct Ferries
Firney developed a scalable AI assistant in just 15 weeks, featuring an intuitive route discovery system that allows customers to effortlessly explore travel options—even when they’re unaware of specific port names.
What we achieved
Background
Goal: Consistently great customer service
Direct Ferries, a leading ferry ticket platform, partnered with us to simplify and streamline their customer booking experience. In July 2024 alone, their support teams handled over 7,000 FAQ-style inquiries, highlighting common user confusion—most notably, customers often didn’t know the exact ports for their intended journeys, creating friction and making route discovery difficult.
“Customers often didn’t know the exact ports for their intended journeys”
We addressed these challenges by implementing an intelligent self-service AI, simultaneously enhancing the booking experience for users and reducing internal support workloads.
Our solution
We deployed a production-ready AI-powered Booking Assistant with a strong focus on simplifying route discovery.
- Smart route discovery:
- Using AI it expands user queries (e.g., “UK to France”) into hundreds of variations and localised spellings, then applies semantic matching and popularity weighting to surface the correct ports and most likely routes.
- Complex travel queries:
- Handles detailed questions about passenger types, group sizes, same-day and future dates, cheapest options, and fastest routes.
- Continuous improvement:
- Captures user feedback and behaviour to generate insights and refine the booking experience over time.
- Cloud-native performance:
- Built on scalable infrastructure to deliver fast, reliable, natural-language interactions.
- Seamless integration:
- Deployed directly into the Direct Ferries landing page and existing APIs for smooth adoption.
Our goal was to make booking a ferry as simple as having a conversation. This agent has delivered that vision perfectly, creating a seamless and wonderfully intuitive journey for our customers.
Simplifying travel planning, Firney's new AI assistant allows customers to effortlessly discover routes even without specific port names—a scalable solution developed in only 15 weeks.
