Every guest email asks the same thing: can you help me plan this trip? The answer usually already exists somewhere — on the website, in a tour document, or in a senior agent’s head. Finding it and writing it up takes time.
As bookings grew, so did the shared sales inbox. For Canada Rail Vacations, we built an email agent that reads each inquiry, searches CRV’s approved knowledge base, and leaves a ready-to-review draft in Gmail. Agents start every reply from verified answers instead of a blank page.
The knowledge base
Everything the agent writes comes from one place. We pulled CRV’s route information, tour details, pricing and policies into a single knowledge base with three layers, used in strict order:
→ Answers: approved Q&A pairs, treated as the source of truth.
→ Knowledge Base: chunked plain text that supplies context and CRV’s voice.
→ Documents and URLs: supporting material, including .txt and .docx uploads and web pages.
CRV’s travel agents run it themselves through a custom Knowledge Base UI. New content passes an approval queue before it goes live. Every upload creates a new version, and old entries can be retired or rolled back. New content is indexed in about an hour and visible to agents in about 30 minutes.
Impact on operations
Before, CRV’s agents spent a large part of their day writing out answers they had already given many times, often tracking down the right colleague to confirm the details. Now qualifying inquiries arrive with a draft already waiting in Gmail, so a reply that once took real effort is now a quick review and a click of send.
In a matter of weeks, the knowledge base grew from 842 structured Q&A examples to more than 5,366 indexed rows — 6.4x more verified context for the agent to draw on. CRV’s team now owns the system and maintains and expands it in-house.
Enter the agent
The agent is built on Claude, Anthropic’s AI model. An N8N workflow watches CRV’s shared inbox and checks for new work every 60 seconds. Staff hand an email to the agent by applying a Gmail label — a simple on/off switch for AI on any inquiry.
What the agent does:
→ Drafts replies from CRV-approved content, runs validation checks, and saves them as Gmail Drafts.
→ Knows its limits, drafting only when the knowledge base holds enough verified information.
→ Escalates the rest to a human travel expert instead of answering incompletely.
Why grounded answers matter
Guests booking a once-in-a-lifetime rail trip need answers they can rely on. We designed the agent so it can’t improvise. It searches the approved knowledge base before writing a word, and when the information isn’t there, it hands off instead of guessing.
The agent never sends an email. Every draft is reviewed by a CRV travel agent, so the team’s judgment and personal touch stay on every guest interaction. Every inbound and outbound message is logged for monitoring and fine-tuning. And because the knowledge base is theirs, the agent improves every time CRV adds approved content.
