Wanderlyst

Wanderlyst Travel Group ran a booking site built the way most travel sites are: a search form up top, a wall of destination cards below, and a checkout flow bolted onto flights, stays, and tours as three separate carts. Travelers arrived with a vague idea — "somewhere warm," "food-focused," "a week in Japan" — and left the interface to do the work of turning that vibe into a real plan. Most didn't. Session data showed travelers bouncing between 15+ destination pages without ever assembling a single itinerary, and cart abandonment across the three-part checkout ran above 60%.

Their support team absorbed the gap. The same pre-booking questions — visa rules, what a "moderate" budget actually bought, whether a hotel was walkable to the sights — flooded email and chat, most of them arriving after hours when no agent was on shift. Wanderlyst needed a planning experience that did the assembly work itself, turning a destination and a vibe into a day-by-day plan without fifteen browser tabs, and it needed a concierge that could answer real questions and touch real bookings, not a support ticket queue with a chat window bolted on.

There was a trust dimension too: travelers don't hand a stranger their week off work. An AI-generated itinerary had to read like it was built by someone who actually knew Kyoto or Patagonia, with specific times, real neighborhoods, and reasoning a traveler could sanity-check — not a generic listicle with the city name swapped in.

The brief: rebuild search and discovery around an AI trip planner that outputs a bookable day-by-day itinerary in seconds, add a conversational concierge available before and during the trip, and unify flights, stays, and experiences into one checkout.

Since launch, travelers who complete the AI Trip Planner flow convert to a booking at more than double the rate of those browsing destination pages alone, and median time from landing on the site to a saved itinerary dropped from several sessions to under four minutes. The concierge now resolves the large majority of visa, packing, and itinerary-change questions without a human agent, including a meaningful share handled outside business hours. Combined checkout adoption has cut cart abandonment sharply versus the old three-part flow. We're now scoping a group-trip planning mode and a multilingual concierge rollout for Wanderlyst's international markets.