This year I went on holiday with my boyfriend to Germany. Since we were both really busy before our trip, we hadn’t spent much time preparing it. A couple of days before we were leaving, we still had no clear plan, and this stressed me out a bit.

That’s when I decided to ask my friend ChatGPT for help. I started by making a list of main criteria. First, we didn’t have much money, so the trip had to be budget-proof. Second, we only had one week, so we couldn’t travel too far. And lastly, we added some personal preferences, for example, that we wanted a mix of seeing nature and cities.

Within seconds ChatGPT came up with a detailed day-to-day plan. It showed how many kilometers we had to drive every day, suggested cities to stop in, and listed recommendations for hotels and fun activities. After reading this, we added some more information about our personal preferences, and the plan that came after this was even better. Suddenly, what had felt like a stressful and overwhelming task for me became really simple.

Of course, the plan was not perfect. Some recommendations were outdated, so we had to check everything carefully. And ChatGPT doesn’t make bookings for you, so we also had to do that ourselves. But it saved us a lot of time and made our process much easier. It helped that we didn’t have to start from scratch, but we could work with a draft and adjust it to our needs.

When I look back on this experience, I see both the strengths and weaknesses of using GenAI for travel planning. The two most important strengths for me were the time-saving and the creativity. Normally I take days or sometimes weeks to come up with the perfect travel route, and this time it only took one night. GenAI also came with creative ideas to make the trip more special by recommending little villages along the way instead of only the touristic hot spots you mostly see on travel blogs.

On the other hand, I noticed the importance of human judgment. A lot of recommendations were outdated, so you really have to check the whole trip. This means that the responsibility still lies with the traveler to check all the details. I think that you can use AI as a personal assistant but not as a travel agent that plans your whole holiday.

A possible improvement for using GenAI as a travel assistant is integrating real-time data. It would help a lot if GenAI could check, for example, hotel availability or the current opening hours of attractions. In this way, it could change from an inspiration source to a complete travel planner.

Overall, I knew that GenAI could be helpful for a wide variety of tasks. But this experience showed me how much of a game changer GenAI can be. What started as a stressful task became really easy and fun. GenAI not only saved me time, but it also made my trip more special. I’ve been reminded that you should use GenAI only as a smart assistant and not as a full travel agent, because you still have to check everything. What surprised me the most was how much it reduced my stress. Instead of worrying about planning, I could focus on looking forward to the trip itself.