HeliNY, New York City’s largest helicopter tour operator, has recovered more than $232,000 in abandoned bookings since moving its business to TripWorks, the booking and business management platform for tour and experience operators.
The figure reflects how the operator is using automation to capture demand that would otherwise slip away, helping to enable healthy growth across the business. The $232,000 was recovered through TripWorks’ automated abandoned cart campaigns, which re-engage customers who start but do not complete a booking, turning would-be lost sales into confirmed flights.
The results come amid a challenging period for New York City tourism, with international visitor numbers down sharply. Despite this, HeliNY has processed more than 210,000 bookings since January 2025, flying more than 200 tours a week and carrying over 60,000 passengers a year from the Downtown Manhattan Heliport and Linden Municipal Airport in New Jersey.
“What people don’t understand is that this isn’t an add-on product,” said Paul Blodgett, CEO of HeliNY. “This is how you run your day-to-day operations. And converting to TripWorks has enabled us to dramatically grow our business this year.”
Blodgett, a former Deutsche Bank Managing Director who spent more than two decades on Wall Street before taking the helm at HeliNY, has brought a banker’s data discipline to the 30-year-old aviation business.
“When we looked at the business, one of the biggest opportunities was around analytics, systems, efficiency and technology,” Blodgett said. “And that major technology gap is ultimately what led us to TripWorks. We knew our business would continue to grow, and we needed a platform that was scalable and could handle that growth projection.”
Alongside the AI and automation gains, HeliNY has completed more than 133,000 digital waivers and now manages over 10 online travel agency integrations, relationships with hundreds of hotels and concierges, walk-in reseller channels, and direct online bookings through a single platform, with buy-now-pay-later options through Klarna and upsells built into the booking journey.
HeliNY is now piloting further AI-powered chat and voice tools, including an AI phone agent currently in testing, to improve guest communication and booking conversion, while keeping people at the center of the experience.
“Operators have heard plenty about what AI could do for their businesses,” said Aaron Fessler, CEO and founder of TripWorks. “HeliNY shows what it looks like in practice: recovered bookings, better use of the team’s time and healthy, sustainable growth. That is exactly what this technology should be doing for operators. Automating these issues means more revenue for tour businesses, while freeing up more of their time to focus on what they do best – offering transformative experiences to travelers.”
