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As someone who regularly creates itineraries for my job, I’m suspicious.
The days of drowning in a sea of browser tabs, conflicting reviews, and meticulously crafted spreadsheets to plan the perfect holiday are numbered. A new era in travel is dawning, and it’s powered by artificial intelligence. No longer a futuristic concept, AI is rapidly evolving into a personal travel concierge, capable of sifting through immense volumes of data to craft bespoke itineraries in mere seconds.
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In fact, AI is becoming so prevalent in our daily lives, I even got it to write that first paragraph! (Did it sound a little… uninspiring?)
At face value, getting AI to plan your next holiday seems like a great idea. But as someone who regularly creates itineraries as part of my job, I’m suspicious. I know how tricky it can be sometimes. So I thought I would put AI to the test with the three most popular models – ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude.
Starting with something easy to assess, I ask each of them to “plan me a two-day travel itinerary for Canberra”. They all come back with different proposed schedules but some common features. All suggest the free tour at Parliament House and give good advice to book in advance. They also all suggest visiting the Australian War Memorial and the National Gallery of Australia. When it comes to food, there are slightly different suggestions, but generally they all recommend Braddon, Manuka, Civic, or Kingston Foreshore.
There are some obvious problems in some of the information, though. ChatGPT tells me that Questacon is free to visit (it’s not); Claude says the Last Post ceremony at the War Memorial is at 4.55pm (it starts at 4.30pm); and Gemini suggests I start cycling around the lake at 5pm (which is not a great idea in winter).
I’m also left a bit confused about how best to use my time. One itinerary wants me to visit Parliament House and the War Memorial before lunch, while another fills the whole day with just those two attractions. One itinerary leaves out the National Portrait Gallery; one gives it only 30 minutes; and the other lumps it in with an unrealistically busy afternoon of lakeside activities including the NGA, Questacon, and the National Museum of Australia.
But to me, the biggest problem is that these itineraries are all just so… uninspiring. Like the opening paragraph of this story, they sound like what you would expect from AI. And so I tell them all that, and ask for something more interesting.
Claude takes it too far, setting aside three hours to see the street art in Braddon and suggesting one of my evenings should be a pub crawl in Civic. ChatGPT doesn’t go far enough, filling most of one day with Parliament House and the National Gallery but putting coffee in Braddon in the middle for a “local experience”. But Gemini does a pretty good job, with some fun ideas like markets on a weekend morning, a Chinatown lunch in Dickson, an e-scooter along the lake, and drinks at a craft brewery in Fyshwick.
If you’re a Canberran, you can probably immediately get a sense of how good these suggestions are. But generally you won’t be asking AI to create itineraries for your home, you’ll be asking about places you’ve never been. So how are you to know what’s right and wrong, what’s unrealistic timewise, or (the worst of all) what is uninspiring?
Firstly, the more prompts you give AI, the less generic it will be, so try to include as much context as possible, including the month of travel, your budget, your interests, and maybe personal information like gender and age. Don’t be afraid to challenge the first couple of itineraries it puts forward, perhaps asking for fewer famous landmarks or more local restaurants.
And, while we need to accept some limitations of AI, we can embrace its strengths. I’ve found it to be really good with public transport, so give it a list of attractions you want to visit in a city and it will work out the most efficient order, including the exact trains and buses you need to catch, how much it will cost, and what time you’ll be back at your hotel.
AI tends to be really bad with any live pricing, so it doesn’t work well to find you affordable hotel rooms on a particular day, for instance. But it is useful for calculating general budgets. You could describe the way you travel and ask for a two-week budget for a particular destination. Or you could give it a specific amount, some information about what you want to do, and ask for the best way to spread out that money.
It also isn’t that good at really telling you where the ‘best’ anything is – whether that’s the best cafe in Florence, the best lunch restaurant in West Hollywood, or the best hotel in Bangkok. But it is quite good at putting together a summarised list of other recommendations, which can be a useful starting point for your own research. Still, be as specific as possible about what you’re looking for.
Remember, you’re asking a computer, not a person, for advice. Claude hasn’t seen any of the galleries in Paris, Gemini hasn’t eaten at any ramen restaurants in Tokyo, and ChatGPT has never tried to walk around Melbourne. Suggestions from AI are sourced from the web, and anything subjective is usually just an amalgam of the most commonly mentioned places.
It’s why using AI is good for some general inspiration, for planning fact-based logistics, or for crunching data. But there’s a reason we still ask our friends and families for recommendations and why travel agents I speak to aren’t too worried about their future. We should want our holidays to be special – and we’re not going to get that from the banal itineraries currently being written by AI.
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