Would you let AI plan your holiday?

Travel planning has never been a straight road. According to the Trends Global Survey, travellers spend over five hours consuming online travel content for inspiration and plan their trip 45 days in advance before finally booking their journey. Now with generative AI in the picture, more and more people are kickstarting their journey using chatGPT by OpenAI or Llama by Meta, among others, saving time and hitting their travel goals.

Speaking about the experience of using generative AI, Waleed Helal, 36-year-old Egyptian marketer and resident of Dubai, says, “Firstly, if there’s a new city it helps me a lot in terms of identifying the itinerary, identifying the places that I should visit, things that I should do in the destination. Basically, it’s for exploring, understanding and planning my itinerary, especially if it's the first time and if I want to explore many things.”

Prompts matter

Most importantly, when it comes to handling detailed or complex itineraries, AI makes it possible, provided your prompting is right, adds Helal. “My prompting, it’s always in detail. Sometimes I prompt it to ask me questions that a travel expert would want to know. Or I prompt it, as in, I know what I want to do, and then I'm prompting it based on that.”

One of the significant changes that AI will bring is the time saved in planning and exploring all that a place has to offer. Highlighting this, Dubai-resident Rohit Arora, 46-year-old Indian Director of Strategy & Growth, explains, “In the good old days of non chatGPT, you would go and try to Google things about, let's say, five days or three days in XYZ, depending on the days of your travel and all. And with that, you could compare the itineraries. Now this entire process would otherwise take about, let's say, three hours to five hours. But now with chatGPT, you enter your dates, when your flight is landing, and the entire itinerary comes to you in 10 minutes or even less versus five hours. I think a big benefit is the simplification of life.”

However, these tools are not yet there when it comes to discovering hidden gems, leaving room for something that many feel AI could replace: the human element. Helal elaborates, “Now, to be honest, most of the things that show up are the normal things you can find over the internet. There are no significant hidden gems. The hidden gems that I have always explored, I explored through the people who basically are in the destination itself, and they recommend you some other experiences, which you didn't know about from chatGPT or AI. There's always space for some human knowledge and human interaction.”

Moreover, these itineraries serve up the broad strokes that you can then narrow down based on preferences and even use at your convenience. Arora does exactly that. “Whether you follow the itinerary exactly, that's completely up to each individual, but at least it gives you a broad guideline in terms of what to see, what not to see, and even get customised. Let’s say, on this holiday that I just went for in Azerbaijan, I even asked for recommendation for an authentic restaurant serving Azerbaijani food. Then for each day, for lunch and dinner, it recommended where I should go. It was kind of almost everything that I would want to know as a tourist in minutes. Now, once I go there, of course, I will talk to the locals, I will try to figure it out, and I can ask them, hey, what about this place?”

Helal, who used to do his research extensively using search engines and travel sites before AI, feels that the generators also give him a format that he’s comfortable with. Although his explorations don’t just end at that. “The thing that I like most and is interesting for me is the ability to plan things and export it to Excel. This makes a difference. And then I can verify it. Once I take the information, sometimes I verify it with YouTube. Or if I want to check whether an event is happening. Is this experience really there or not, to be on the safe side.”

Tailor-made plans

Arora is also looking forward to a world in which AI will be integrated within his travel websites. “What would be nice, let’s say I go to my favourite travel website, and they already know the kind of, hotels I like to go to, for example and other things about my travel preference. What happens is, the GPT gets tailored information to plan my holiday. I think that kind of integration would be really cool, because then I don't have to go to look at a different app.”

Now that discovery begins in the world of AI even before you step foot on foreign land. But as with all things tech the trick is to use it as a trusted sidekick and add the human touch wherever necessary.

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