Traveling is a great way to spend your holiday, having fun and exploring a new place with your beloved family, friends or just by yourself. If you’re the kind of person who likes to organize things, make clear schedules before setting off, there’s several AI tools for you to plan everything more efficiently.
Nowadays, various kinds of AI trip planner tools have been introduced to the market. Popular ones like Roam Around, Trip Planner AI and Tripnotes have attracted many users to use their service for making customized travel schedules. These AI travel planner tools not only have a list of renowned and most searched cities for your reference, but also a wide range of selective options in types of food, activities to join, and suitable accommodation based on your budget. Furthermore, if you have any special requests or constraints such as traveling with a baby or having a fixed plan on a particular day, the AI tools could help to add these into consideration and regenerate a travel itinerary that best suits all your needs.
To see how these AI trip planner tools really work, I personally tried out two of them on planning a 5-day trip to Barcelona, Spain. In the first round, I used ChatGPT, a well-known conversational AI tool, to plan the trip by giving specific requests and instructions. In the beginning, it provides me with a daily schedule diving each day into morning, afternoon, and evening. It even gives a title for each day based on the main activities planned, for instance, “Day 2: Barcelona – Cultural and Architectural Exploration”. Afterwards, I asked ChatGPT to evaluate the average budget for the trip, with a special request of keeping it economical. It estimated the spendings based on five items: accommodation, meals, transportation, attraction and activities and miscellaneous expenses. The estimated average budget per person is around €275~590, quite a big range though. To get more information about where to eat, I told ChatGPT that I love Spanish seafood risotto, and it did give a list of restaurants with their addresses. Below are some screenshots (just part of the answer is shown) of how I utilized ChatGPT to help me form a basic travel itinerary.
In the second round, I tried another free AI travel planner called Roam Around. I was impressed with the UI design of the site, it looks pretty simple and cute with the purple background color. After I input “Barcelona” as the place to go, it automatically generated a “5-day trip to Barcelona” itinerary with recommended tourist sites, restaurants and accommodation. The best part is that there’s a link for each location, which you could directly click the links to book tickets for visiting famous sites, check the restaurants’ location on google map, and book hotel rooms. There’s even a map on the page that shows every location in the plan so you can check and adjust the travel routes as you wish. Moreover, Roam Around can also customize your itinerary. It works quite similar to ChatGPT, just input your special requests in the chat box and desired changes would be made to the plan. The screenshot below shows how the webpage of Roam Around looks like.
After trying out the above two tools, I found that AI tools designed specifically for travel planning such as Roam Around are more suitable for people with little idea about where to visit and what to do at your destination. It saves you a lot of time and energy from gathering information through the search engine. The links attached to each location also makes it much easier to plan routes, buy tickets and reserve for restaurants and hotels in advance. As for using ChatGPT, it’s better if you already have something in mind about the trip because more specific prompts are needed to generate a clear and customized travel itinerary. A small finding while using ChatGPT is that it always adds a line saying “Please note that these are rough estimates and actual costs may vary.” when being asked about travel budgets. Perhaps it’s reminding people not to blame ChatGPT if you go over budget!
As more and more people rely on AI trip planner tools to accelerate and simplify their travel planning process, a survey from Euromonitor mentioned that 97.8% of the travel executives believe that Artificial Intelligence will affect the industry in the next 5 years. Professionals suggest that “accessing to real-time data” is the key success factor for these AI tools. Afterall, current transportation alternatives, special events, and prices are important information for every traveler. So next time when you’re planning for a trip, try to pick a user-friendly, reliable and real-time informative AI trip planning tool as your assistance!
Bibliography
ETTravelWorld (2023, July 14). Use of AI tools such as ChatGPT to plan travel itineraries set to boom, reveals. ETTravelWorld.https://travel.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/research-and-statistics/research/use-of-ai-tools-such-as-chatgpt-to-plan-travel-itineraries-set-to-boom-reveals-reserach/101753180?redirect=1
Nitesh Malviya (2023, September 11). 10 AI Travel Planners to Generate Personalized Travel Itineraries. Geekflare. https://geekflare.com/ai-travel-planners/
The Upwork Team (2023, August 9). The Top 7 AI Trip Planner Tools. The Upwork Team. https://www.upwork.com/resources/top-ai-trip-planner-tools
Cool experiment! Thank you for sharing. It’s interesting to see how AI is becoming an integral part of the travel industry.
Hi Ting!
As someone who loves traveling, your blog post was really interesting and eye-opening to read! What I liked the most was that you provided us with hands-on examples based on your own experience using the tool. Also good to see that you already tried it out for us to see which tool is best ;). I also really liked the statistics that indicate the increasing importance of AI in the travel industry (and probably every other industry).
Do you think this technology will disrupt the travel industry? I think it will be very interesting to see all the developments in this part of the AI spectrum in the coming years.
All in all, I really enjoyed reading your blog post and can’t wait to learn more about it!
HI Ting, thanks for writing this great blog post! I can always look forward to my next holiday and planning everything. these websites will be of great use for idea generation whereas Tripadvisor only shows a ranking list of best restaurants/ hotels. It is also great to see that these recommendations are up to date with current available data!
Thanks for the heads-up about the website and I wonder if all our trips will be planned by AI in the future!