Your Inbox Is Losing You More Bookings Than You Think
We all know that despite having multiple sources of receiving queries Google, Meta, Facebook, Instagram, websites, and chatbots most B2B enquiries from travel agents still come through email.
And that’s where the struggle for your team begins.
At 10 AM, when your sales team opens their inbox, they aren’t greeted by a neat list of customer enquiries waiting to be answered.
Their inbox is filled with everything. Payment invoices. Supplier emails. Payment confirmations. Internal communication. Spam. Follow-ups. And somewhere in between all of this… a genuine booking enquiry.
Finding that enquiry can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack.
And once they find it, the real work begins. If we summarise what your sales team is doing between 10 AM and 12 PM, it probably looks something like this
- Open and read every enquiry email
- Understand the customer’s requirements
- Identify important trip details
- Extract travel dates, destinations, passenger details, and other information
- Copy all the details manually into the CRM
- Create a new lead or trip request
- Assign it to the right team member
- Start the follow-up process
And that’s just one inquiry.
When enquiry volumes increase, this manual process becomes even harder. Your team spends valuable time processing enquiries instead of responding to them.
The result? Delayed responses. Manual data entry. Missed enquiries. Inconsistent lead tracking. And eventually, lost opportunities.
Why Manual Email Handling Slows Down Your Sales ( 5 Big Reasons)
1. Enquiries are read but unanswered: It happens a lot that your team forgets to reply to a mail they opened in the morning, but while juggling ten other things, they forgot about it. These enquiries are not bouncing back or landing in spam.
2. Every enquiry needs manual reading: a Salesperson sits for about 10-15 minutes on a single enquiry sorting & re-typing. That’s before a single line of itinerary is written. They need to understand what the agent/traveller wants: dates, destinations, group size, budget and then manually punch that into a quote or CRM entry.
3. Responses are dependent on availability: Response time depends on who’s free, not who’s fastest.If your best salesperson is on a call, the enquiry waits. It remains unattended till the time that salesperson revisits the inbox. If they are busy in handling old queries, doing amendments to or cold calling a hot lead in the mail is gone.
4. Details get missed or misread: An agent mentions “no early morning flights” halfway through a long email. While the team captures destination, travel dates, number of travellers, hotel preferences, activities, and budget, that one critical instruction gets overlooked. The quotation is prepared with an early morning flight anyway. Before the conversation has even begun, the client is already questioning whether their requirements were actually understood or not.
5. Faster competitors’ reply wins always: Agents rarely send an enquiry to just one DMC. Most reach out to 3-4 operators at the same time, comparing both response time and quality. Across B2B sales, one pattern is consistent: the business that responds first is significantly more likely to win the enquiry, a slower response often means the opportunity is already gone
This is where AI Email Parsing is changing the way travel businesses manage their inbox.
What Is AI Email Parsing?
AI Email Parsing is a simple technology of using artificial intelligence to read, understand incoming emails & automatically extract relevant information from them.
Finance, e-commerce, logistics, & healthcare industries are already actively using AI email parsing for tasks like updating inventory, managing company data, processing patient records & more. And it has been saving hours of manual work, reducing errors and mistakes for them.
What AI Email Parsing does for a Travel business?
Now you might be curious how this will work for a travel business:
With AI Email Parsing, your team no longer has to manually read every email, enter enquiry details into Excel or your travel CRM, or keep going back to the inbox whenever a client sends an update or continues the conversation. AI handles the initial processing for you, automatically extracting key information and keeping everything organized from the very first email.
Let’s understand this with an example: imagine receiving an enquiry email like:
Now what AI Email Parsing will do is identify key information such as:
- Number of travellers: 2 (Couple)
- Travel dates: 10th–20th November
- Destination: India
- Cities to visit: Delhi, Agra & Jaipur
- Trip duration: 11 Days / 10 Nights
- Hotel preference: 4-star hotels
- Transfers: Private airport transfers
- Transportation: Private vehicle throughout the tour
- Sightseeing: Major attractions in all three cities
- Special requirement: Private English-speaking guide for the Taj Mahal
- Optional experiences requested: Cultural evening in Jaipur, local food walk, premium add-on experiences
- Quotation requested with: Hotel names, inclusions, exclusions, sightseeing details, transfer details, monument entrance fees, guide charges, and B2B rates
- Additional request: Available special offers or complimentary inclusions for the travel dates
So, now instead of starting from a blank screen, your expert salesperson starts with a ready-to-work-on enquiry.
Step-by-Step How Does AI Email Parsing by Sembark Work?
The process is simple.
Step 1: The Enquiry Arrives
A customer or travel partner sends an enquiry to your business email. The email could come from a direct customer, B2B partner, OTA, or another travel source.
Step 2: AI Reads the Email Instantly
The AI engine analyses the content of the email and understands the context instead of simply looking for individual keywords. It identifies important travel-related information from the conversation.
Step 3: Important Details Are Extracted
The system identifies information such as:
- Traveller details
- Destination
- Travel dates
- Number of passengers
- Duration
- Hotel requirements
- Activities
- Budget
- Special requests
Step 4: A Lead or Trip Request Is Created
The extracted information is organised into a structured format and added to the travel CRM. Your team doesn’t have to manually copy and paste every detail.
Step 5: Your Team Takes Over
Now the salesperson or travel consultant can focus on what actually matters-understanding the customer, creating the right itinerary, and closing the booking.
AI handles repetitive work. So your team handles conversions.
Final Thoughts: Let AI Handle the Inbox While You Close Deals
Is It Worth It?
When your team receives 100+ email enquiries every day, but 10% of those emails are your real business is when you start losing profit. So the real value of AI Email Parsing isn’t just about saving a few minutes on every email. It’s about what happens when those minutes add up across hundreds or thousands of enquiries.
If processing one enquiry takes just 5-10 minutes, that’s more than 4-8 hours of manual work. In simple words, your team sits for about 2+ hours daily just to find which query they should respond to.
AI Email removes all of these stages, and your salesperson starts right by sending a quotation in 2 minutes to any incoming email enquiry.
That’s the real business impact.
AI isn’t replacing your sales team. It’s helping your sales team spend less time on repetitive work and more time on revenue-generating activities.
Learn more about lead management in Sembark.
