How I built a WhatsApp booking bot for a UK Umrah operator (full breakdown)

Placeholder post — full write-up coming soon. This is the outline so the post page renders.

A UK-based Umrah operator was spending real money on Google Ads and losing most of the leads after hours. The "request a quote" form on their WordPress site had twelve fields and a captcha. Mobile users — 80% of their ad traffic — never made it past field three.

This post breaks down the WhatsApp booking bot I built to replace it.

What you'll get from this post

• The exact n8n workflow (with screenshots)
• How I set up Meta WhatsApp Business Cloud API end-to-end
• The conversation design: what the bot says, when it hands off to a human, how it asks for dates / pax / package
• Conversation memory using Postgres (and why in-n8n state will betray you at scale)
• Lead capture into Google Sheets + the operator's CRM
• The honest numbers — bookings before vs after

The stack

• n8n (self-hosted, $5 DigitalOcean VPS)
• WhatsApp Business API via Meta Cloud API
• Chatwoot for human handoff
• Postgres for conversation memory
• Google Sheets + Slack for lead notifications

The hardest parts

1. Template message approval — Meta is picky. Templates with prices, promises or "click here" language get rejected. I'll show you the ones that passed.
2. Conversation memory — first version held state in n8n. That worked for 5 conversations and broke at 50. The fix is in this post.
3. Pricing honesty — the operator did not want the bot quoting fares it couldn't honour. Solution: the bot never invents a number.

The full post is being written

I'm writing this one based on the actual project. Subscribe to the RSS feed or check back next week.

Want this for your own travel agency? Book a 20-minute call.