“FareHarbor Agent gives us another way to handle those straightforward customer questions so our team can spend more time on complex conversations and proactive outreach. That creates more opportunities for us to connect customers with our nonprofit mission and show them the impact their experience has.”

John Gaskins, Business Development Director

PacWhale Eco-Adventures uses FareHarbor Agent to give its team more time to focus on the customer experience. By allowing the agent to answer common questions and guide customers toward booking, PacWhale can reserve more of its team’s time for detailed requests and proactive conversations, including educating customers about the conservation work their bookings help support.

PacWhale Eco-Adventures

Based in Maui, PacWhale Eco-Adventures offers ocean experiences including snorkeling, sunset cruises, sailing, whale and dolphin watching, and private charters. Its ecotours are rooted in more than four decades of marine research and sustainable ocean tourism.

But every trip has a purpose beyond the experience itself. PacWhale Eco-Adventures is a social enterprise wholly owned by Pacific Whale Foundation, and profits generated through PacWhale help support the nonprofit’s programs. The relationship between tourism and conservation stretches back to the Foundation’s early days, when researchers began offering educational whale watches as a way to share their findings with the public and raise funds for continued research and conservation work.

That mission makes the way PacWhale uses its team especially important. Every opportunity to educate a customer about an upcoming initiative, explain the impact of their purchase, or build a deeper connection with the Foundation can help extend the impact of the experience beyond the time spent on the water.

Creating more space for meaningful customer conversations

PacWhale Eco-Adventures already had a dedicated customer relations team handling customer calls and booking questions. The opportunity was not to fix an underperforming support experience, but to use that team’s time more strategically.

Many incoming calls involve straightforward, one-off questions that do not necessarily require assistance from a live reservationist. Customers might need basic logistical information, booking guidance, or answers to common questions before their trip. Each interaction is relatively simple, but collectively they add to the team’s workload.

The volume becomes particularly important during whale season, when PacWhale experiences a significant increase in calls. The team wanted a way to absorb more of those routine conversations while keeping its customer relations staff available for situations that require a human touch.

At the same time, PacWhale is evolving the role of customer relations to include more proactive outreach. The goal is to give team members more opportunities to connect with customers about upcoming events, Pacific Whale Foundation initiatives, and how proceeds from their ecotours help support conservation, research, education, and outreach efforts.

Using FareHarbor Agent to support customers and the team

PacWhale Eco-Adventures launched FareHarbor Agent in June 2026, with a clear use case: let the agent take on common questions while keeping the customer relations team available when more personalized support is needed.

FareHarbor Agent can respond to common customer questions, use business information and real-time booking data to guide customers, and send booking links when a customer is ready to reserve. Then, more unique conversations can still be passed to the customer relations team when necessary.

PacWhale implemented the agent as an ongoing learning process. The team added questions and answers from its website and previous chatbot to Agent’s knowledge base. From there, staff continued refining the information based on actual customer interactions. A dedicated team member reviews conversations and adjusts the knowledge base when new questions or opportunities arise.

This approach allows PacWhale to continuously improve how Agent responds while maintaining control over the customer experience. 

The results

The early results show FareHarbor Agent is already supporting both customer communication and sales.

In the first several weeks, Agent automated 169 of 511 eligible tickets, a 33% automation rate. During the same period, approximately 50 bookings came through FareHarbor Agent, representing about $20,000 in TTV.

For a company where every ecotour helps support Pacific Whale Foundation’s work, that additional time gives them more opportunities to connect its customers with the mission behind every adventure.