Widgety are pleased to be officially launching the Widgety AI Cruise Assistant at CLIA Southampton, coinciding with a celebration for Widgety’s 10th birthday.
Built exclusively for the trade, this isn’t a replacement for travel agents. It’s a power-up, designed to provide support, streamline sales and supercharge every agent’s ability to sell a cruise – even if they’ve never stepped on board the ship.
The AI Cruise Assistant has been 14 months in development, is fully powered by the Widgety API, and has already been tested by more than 250 agents.
Travel agents spend hours hunting through brochures, operator websites, and PDFs for answers they should have in seconds. The AI Cruise Assistant allows agents to find ‘instant answers, one chat away’, answering complex customer queries without contacting the cruise line directly.
Agents can search 2,500 ships and over 75,000 itineraries, and the response from early adopters has been incredible, with Emma Sanger-Horwell, Director of Cruise at Travelpack, noting: “This is far more than just another piece of technology.” – read Emma’s full review
Data is pulled from Widgety’s industry-leading API, ensuring accuracy and reliability. Whether you’re a seasoned cruise seller or an apprentice, the assistant works dynamically to save you from scrolling through web pages or brochures to answer a customer’s question. Instead, you can find your answer instantly and generate an email quote ready to show the client sitting across from you.
So far, agents have been using the AI Cruise Assistant to answer both simple and complex queries including:
“compare Viking vs AmaWaterways”
“Looking for Celebrity cruise visiting Scandinavia, 10-14 nights, Between 20 July – 20 August 2027”
“What ‘insider guidance’ can I give a client who is thinking of going on a wet season Mekong cruise?”
The AI Cruise Assistant is engineered to support every corner of a travel business, making it a valuable asset for the entire desk. Beyond helping in-store agents pull instant answers, it acts as a vital virtual colleague for remote homeworkers answer complex queries with no colleague sitting next to them. In high-volume environments, call centre staff can rapidly reduce after-call work by generating chat summaries at the click of a button.
Marketing teams can skip endless data-digging and use the AI Cruise Assistant to draft instant promotional copy, while operators and IT teams can easily verify live ship features, itineraries, and rates across the entire team network.
The Widgety Team will be at the CLIA Southampton Trade Fair on Thursday 4th June, showing travel professionals how they can request anything from a simple itinerary query to complex side-by-side comparative ship tables, and receive an instant answer.
The AI Cruise Assistant features fully customisable branding to match your company identity, activity analytics for agency managers, and saved conversations to easily refer back to chats or generate instant summaries for your customers. Everything you need to streamline your sales is completely built for the desk and tuned for the team.
