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Trip Planner AI Review: Should You Use It for Your Next Trip

published on August 13, 2024

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In this Trip Planner AI review I’ve laid out all of the information you need before using the platform. I must note one thing right away, it’s intuitive and minimalistic, so you shouldn’t have problems using it. Just in case, I left a quick tutorial on how to use AI to plan your trip.

Let’s jump right into it!

What is Trip Planner AI?

Trip Planner AI is a platform that allows you to select destinations, dates, and activities you like to create an ultimate trip itinerary.

It works with all major destinations, with less popular ones being added gradually. Within the itinerary, you get all of the necessary information, tips, and accommodation suggestions.

Here’s what makes this AI-powered platform so special.

Trip Planning

When you open the platform for the first time you’ll have to answer a few questions. It takes less than a minute, and it’s your input to the AI model and system that will output a perfect trip for you.

Like any other trip planner, the most important questions are where * and when .

* Some destinations are still unsupported

You can plan as far as you want in the future, but the only requirement is that staying in one destination isn’t longer than 10 days. You can add multiple destinations to your itinerary.

After that’s set you need to choose your preference for the kind of activities *:

• Kid Friendly
• Outdoor Adventures
• Art & Cultural
• Amusement Parks

*You need to select at least one, but you can also select all of them if you’re open to everything.

Finally, you can create an itinerary for up to 10 people . If it’s more than one person, you’ll be prompted if you’re traveling as friends, family, or couple ( in case it’s 2 of you. )

Once you’re done planning, you can even download a PDF outlining your trip. But, let’s go step by step.

Meals Options

Although it’s part of the planning process, I wanted to highlight this aspect of Trip Planner AI. The system automatically finds suitable restaurants and gives you a price estimate based on the location .

You can choose between Cheap, Mid, and High priced restaurants in the area. Then you can also decide which meals you want included in your itinerary, and which you want to handle on your own.

It’s also possible to narrow down the search to vegetarian or vegan-only options . If you’re not concerned about this selection, you can also leave it as Everything.

Detailed Itinerary

As a result of the previous two features, you get an ultra-detailed itinerary . It might take a minute until it loads, but it’s worth the wait.

First, you’ll get detailed information about each location you included in the itinerary. Internet speed, emergency numbers, standard costs of goods, and even a life quality index. This alone can help you plan on your own, but the platform covers you even further.

The day-by-day itinerary is expandable and gives you a forecast of costs and a visualization of locations . Places to sleep, restaurants to eat, and remarkable attractions to visit are all combined on the interactive map.

All of the activities are completely manageable, so if you see that something is missing you can easily add it from the Sights tab . You can also reschedule the activities for different days of stay.

If you’re traveling with somebody, now it’s the ideal moment to share what you have so far. You can include them by showing them the trip through the sharing link, or even invite them to be your tripmate.

All you have to do is to provide their email address and they will receive the link in their inbox to accept this offer. You can add and remove tripmates from the same dashboard.

Although the system will automatically suggest hotels , you can also get the overview, and select them on your own!

AI Hotels Finder

Finding the perfect accommodation is often the biggest pain point of any trip planning. Truth be told, the perfect one rarely exists ( especially if you’re planning at the last moment ), but Trip Planner AI can get you as close to it as possible.

For all of the destinations in your itinerary, you can search for all available options . Navigating them is easy by sorting them in any way you like in the list view, and even exploring them on the interactive map.

Based on your initial inputs, the system will show you more suitable options for you ( and your group .)

It’s worth noting that the Trip Planner AI helps you find these, but the reservations are done through reputable platforms like Booking and HostelWorld .

Compared to the accommodations you can find directly using Google search, here you have fewer filtering options, but the system knows more about your plans, so it adjusts suggestions accordingly.

Chatbot Trippy

What would any AI-powered platform be without an intuitive chatbot ? Trip Planner AI has its own and it even has a name. Meet Trippy!

Since I’m a fan of a show called Suits, I asked Trippy for help about my upcoming trip to NYC. It gave me some generic ideas on what I could see, but nothing related to the show, so I clarified that I wanted to see something related to the show itself.

This time it was successful and gave me ideas about a landmark such as the Chrysler Building and its appearance in the show.

So far, I’m not ultra-satisfied, but it’s still a convenient addition to other features .

To give it one more chance I’ve asked about the best hot dog in NYC ( difficult question, really .) Trippy gave me a useful overview this time with correct ratings, and even pointed me to the correct websites of the places!

As you can see, Trippy is far from chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Meta AI , but it serves the need in the Trip Planner AI and I’m happy it’s included.

How to use Trip Planner AI?

Here’s what you should do to start using Trip Planner AI.

Tip: Don’t skip the registration. I did it once and I had to plan the trip from the very beginning!

• Register using your Google account .

• ( Optional ) You can already select hotels to stay at, but I recommend you do it after the plan is created.

That’s it! You successfully planned your first trip with this AI-powered platform. As I already mentioned, the output can be downloaded as a PDF and if you decide it’s a good idea, you can also delete it from the platform.

Alternatively, you can choose to share it with fellow travelers, so it appears in the Community Trips section.

Now when you see all of this you’re surely wondering what’s the price of this AI travel assistant . The answer is $0 . No, seriously, Trip Planner AI is free!

Surely, this can change in the future as more options are added. However, right now, you can get all the benefits I listed earlier without spending a buck.

If you’re wondering what’s in it for the platform, the answer is simple: Commissions. You see, every time you book through the Trip Planner AI link, they earn a commission.

This keeps the platform going, so if you like it, don’t hesitate to book accommodation or make a reservation through the link it provided ( especially if the idea came from there in the first place! )

Trip Planner AI Review – Verdict

To answer the initial question, if your goal is to see as much as possible and stay within your budget, you should use Trip Planner AI However, if you’re traveling for pleasure and are okay with not knowing every detail of your trip, then think twice before using an ultra-organized platform like this.

I’ll conclude this Trip Planner AI review by pointing out that it’s a good choice for those who want everything in one place and have a good idea of how things will roll. It’s potentially a good fit for travel agencies, but as I already said, if you’re looking for a casual vacation, take the advice from the AI with a grain of salt and enjoy the spontaneity.

After the trip is completed, the only thing left to do is post some cool photos on social media. Check out my picks for AI-generated Instagram captions .

Vladan is an AI enthusiast and an experienced user. He covers everything from prompts to reviewing the best AI tools.

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Trip Planner AI

• Community Trips

Your Next Journey, Optimized

Build, personalize, and optimize your itineraries with our free AI trip planner. Designed for vacations, workations, and everyday adventures.

Trip Planner AI is now part of Layla

Trip Planner AI, the original AI trip planner trusted by millions, is now part of Layla.

Your AI-Powered Trip

The most optimal.

Craft your perfect itinerary with Trip Planner AI. Our advanced algorithms take into account your selected explore-sights, dining, and lodging preferences to create the optimal travel plan tailored just for you.

Get Inspired

Extract valuable travel insights from Instagram reels and TikToks, explore the mentioned explore-sights, and effortlessly include them in your own adventure with Trip Planner AI.

TRIP PLANNER AI

The only tool youll ever need.

Say goodbye to the stress of planning and hello to personalized recommendations, efficient itineraries, and seamless dining experiences.

Optimal Route Planning

Our AI algorithms analyze your preferences to craft the most efficient route, saving you time and effort.

Personalize Your Adventure

Shape your journey by freely adding, editing, or deleting activities from your itinerary.

Local Cuisine Recommendations

Discover local cuisines and hidden gems recommended by our AI, tailored to your taste buds.

Dont take our word for it

See what our users have to say about revolutionizing their travel experiences with Trip Planner AI.

Trip Planner AI saves time and stress by aiding travel planning, relieving indecision or uncertainty.

Trip Planner AI offers diverse planning options in a user-friendly interface. Simplifies travel planning for enthusiasts.

I love traveling but hate planning. This app quickly organizes trip agendas, reducing decision fatigue.

Our Trusted Partners

Journey Inspirations from Travelers

Dive into unique trip itineraries crafted by our global travelers. Find your next adventure and share your own journey with fellow explorers.

Trip to Tokyo

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Customized Itineraries for Every Travel Dream

Trip Planner AI is your ultimate companion for any travel scenario. Whether it's a solo adventure, a family vacation, or a group expedition, our app tailors every aspect of your journey. Experience the convenience of:

AI-Powered Route Optimization

Utilize AI for optimal travel routes. Our app ensures a seamless journey, calculating the best paths, travel times, and distances for city tours or cross-country road trips.

All-in-One Travel Organizer

Simplify travel planning with our all-in-one platform. Trip Planner AI consolidates hotel and flight details, manages bookings, and imports tips and guides. Organize all trip details in one place.

Collaborative Group Planning Made Easy

Collaborate on itineraries with companions. Our real-time feature makes group travel planning effortless, ensuring everyone stays informed and involved in the process.

Hi, I'm Layla, your personal travel agent

Ask Anything

Simplify your travel using our trip planner AI

Meet Layla, your ultimate AI travel sidekick. Ask her anything you need to know about your planning your vacation, from dreamy destinations to idyllic stays, flights and road trips. askLAYLA will change the way you plan your trips. Forget juggling a million tabs and apps, this is the only AI trip planner you will need. Chat with Layla for personalized destination ideas and get excited for what’s in store with the inspiring video content from creators you’ll love. Then use your customized itinerary to create a travel plan that will make the most of those precious vacation days.

Plan a new trip

Cute things people have said about askLayla

“An absolutely amazing trip planner, so much incredible information available, produces fantastic itineraries. Great videos, reels etc.”

“Fav new app. Literally planned a whole trip to Thailand for me. She's really funny and smart and I love the bucketlists!!”

“Layla is a fascinating, inspirational ai trip planning tool that made a super customized itinerary for my Japan trip.”

“I'm traveling in #Bali for a month, and I found out about this platform yesterday.I swear I'm in shock. It's like talking to a human, funny, asks questions for better responses, and knows EVERYTHING.”

“It was like chatting with that one friend who's been everywhere, done everything, gave me the best hotel and flight options and planned my entire road trip.”

Your Local AI Travel Planner

For the ultimate personalised Layla experience download the app. It's like having a travel agent in your pocket 24/7 - the perfect ai itinerary planner.

Unforgettable Itineraries, Powered by AI Trip Planner

Tell us your dream destination, and our AI will expertly craft the perfect trip tailored just for you.

AI-Powered Itineraries Customized by You

Our AI experts will create a unique personalized route for you. Forget about the problems of travelers, we will do everything for you.

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Let our AI travel experts craft your complete, personalized trip plan

Complimentary and Ad-Free

Experience our services for free during Beta, no ads included or explore advanced features with our premium AI model.

Complete Customization

Every aspect is fully customizable - tweak locations, add notes, and more

Integrated Itinerary and Map

Access your travel plans and maps seamlessly in one place - no more juggling multiple apps and tabs

Music for Your Journey

Each itinerary comes with a bespoke music selection to enhance your travel experience

Authentic Experiences Only

Avoid the common tourist traps. Our AI selects only the most authentic and unique experiences for your journey

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7 Best AI Trip Planners

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• AI trip planners revolutionize travel planning, offering personalized itineraries and recommendations in minutes.
• Tools like Layla & ChatGPT help travelers with last-minute plans, providing customized suggestions and insights.
• Wonderplan & Trip Planner AI assist in cost breakdown and multi-destination trips, enhancing the travel experience.

It is one thing to think about going on a trip and another to plan for it. The latter is often challenging, as it requires many hours to decide the places to visit and the things to do. Then, travelers will need to book a flight and hotel and organize all the other travel-related logistics, which can be frustrating for those doing it manually.

However, there is some good news. With advanced technology, artificial intelligence is revolutionizing travel, making planning a trip within minutes possible . How? AI trip planners do that. These tools are designed to help travelers customize their itinerary, choose a destination, and decide how they want to spend time there. This eases even planning for a long-term journey .

These tools are equipped with data to recommend the best places to travel to at any given moment, keep a traveler's budget on track, and track their interests, preferences, and tastes. Here is a list of some of the best AI trip-planning tools to use.

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7 Layla (Roam Around)

Best for generating itineraries for tourist destinations.

This software was previously known as Roam Around and is loved for its ease of use. It's designed for travelers who have yet to learn what they will do upon reaching their destination. Once a person enters their destination, travel date, and preferences, the tool will design a complete custom itinerary.

It is perfect for someone planning a vacation at the very last minute . With the headache of planning out of the way, a traveler can focus on enjoying their vacation. Additionally, Layla uses GPT-3 technology to offer recommendations, including places to see, stay, and eat.

Best for determining places to vacation

ChatGPT is a great AI tool designed to produce different outputs. Subscribers can use it to create social media posts, poems, lyrics, blog posts, and more. It uses Natural Language Processing to understand the information keyed in and generate relevant feedback.

Despite its production use, it is one of the best trip-planning tools. Travelers can use it to generate itineraries for different destinations worldwide. For instance, one can type, "I want to visit Arizona. Could you suggest the best places to hike?". In response, they will get a list of scenic hiking trails in Arizona .

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5 Wonderplan

Best for breaking down costs and offering top information.

Wonderplan generates customized itineraries based on a person's destination, interests, and budget. Travelers can outsource it for budget breakdown and estimates on how much they will spend on food, transportation, activities, and accommodation. The tool offers plenty of helpful information needed to make the trip seamless.

It features a beautiful presentation that users can easily navigate through. Users are required to fill out a form with their travel dates, budget, length of stay, when they will leave, who they will travel with, and the activity type they enjoy. The tool will do the rest.

4 Trip Planner AI

Best for planning multi-destination trips.

Like Wonderplan, this tool allows users to generate personalized itineraries. However, it offers some unique and impressive features designed to ensure a seamless trip-planning process.

With Trip Planner AI, users can get inspired by Instagram reels and TikTok videos. They can then add the recommended places to their itineraries. Unlike many other AI Travel planners, Trip Planner AI offers route planning, helping users plan multi-destination trips.

3 Vacay Chatbot

Ai chatbot suggests places to visit, events, hotels & restaurants based on your budget..

Vacay Chatbot helps travelers plan their trips by suggesting which places to visit, live events and concerts to book, and the best hotels and restaurants. Users can prompt the tool to show specific prices charged by different places for their services to help them manage their budget.

The tool is built on OpenAi's GPT technology, which processes the queries and generates custom recommendations.

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Top AI road trip planner with detailed itineraries, budgets & sight suggestions for 24 countries.

Curiosio is the best AI trip planner for road trips. The only drawback is that it offers a limited database and only offers suggestions from 24 countries. But it is very effective for those planning a scenic road trip in the US, be it national park road trip itineraries , cross-country drives, or short but sweet one-day road adventures.

All users need to do is type their starting point and destination, inform the tool whether it is a round trip or a one-way trip, key in any destinations to stop over, the budget, and other specifics, and the tool will do the rest.

Besides creating a detailed itinerary, the tool breaks down days, budgets, and sights, offering a complete plan. Users can export the itinerary and map to Google Maps and use it on the road.

Best for answering questions related to traveling

Users need to answer a few questions about their travel plans, and iplan.ai will generate a detailed itinerary. Travelers can customize or modify their itinerary by adding or removing activities and sharing it with other travelers.

It is easy to use and detailed and can be accessed from different platforms on mobile

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7 Free Travel Planning AI and ChatGPT Apps to Get an Instant Itinerary

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Quick Links

• PLAN by ixigo
• Trip Planner AI
• Vacay Chatbot

Key Takeaways

• Layla, Wonderplan, and PLAN by ixigo are AI travel planning apps with customizable itineraries.
• iplan.ai offers detailed itineraries for popular tourist cities based on interests and budget.
• Curiosio plans road trips on all continents, while Trip Planner AI helps with activity selection and cost estimation.

You can tell a travel agent your preferred dates, the place you want to visit, and your budget, and expect a full itinerary of what to do there based on your preferences. But can AI do the same job?

These free travel planning apps use AI and machine-learning tools like ChatGPT to prepare an itinerary for you in a few seconds, and we took them for a spin.

Layla describes itself as an AI trip planner, meaning you can use it to decide your vacation destination, create itineraries, and find suitable hotels and flights.

If you are uncertain about your destination or would like suggestions, you can ask Layla for advice regarding your trip. Otherwise, enter your destination and ask Layla to create your itinerary. Within a few seconds, you'll get a detailed plan for your trip.

As Layla is a chatbot, you can enter a prompt to ask it to change your itinerary. For instance, ask it to focus more on outdoor activities or include local restaurants. If you're unsatisfied with the activities planned on any particular day, you can give instructions and ask Layla to regenerate that part only.

Once you've perfected your itinerary, you can share it with your friends via a URL or add it to your bucket list.

2. Wonderplan

Wonderplan is a wonderful AI tool for planning your trip. To create your itinerary, Wonderplan first asks you to enter your destination country and city, your budget, the number of days you'll be staying, and your interests.

It then creates a travel plan within a few minutes, displaying various places to visit, their descriptions, and the time usually spent at each location. Although Wonderplan doesn't show the trip map, it does provide a link to Google Maps for each place.

It also displays different types of accommodation available (like Airbnb, hotel, or hostel) and their respective costs. Similarly, there are details about transportation, food, and activities. This way, you can estimate the potential cost of your trip.

In addition to your itinerary, Wonderplan also shows essential information about the country you're visiting. These include the currency conversion rate, electricity plug type, languages spoken, weather, and popular conveyances.

3. PLAN by ixigo

PLAN by ixigo starts by asking you about your dream destination. Then, it provides an option to describe the type of experience you want to have. This is just like a ChatGPT prompt, so you can enter anything you wish.

For example, you can specify the duration of your stay, your interests, the kinds of activities you're looking for, whether you have a family with you, and so on.

But if you can't think of any prompts, PLAN by ixigo provides a few trip ideas, so you can always select those. PLAN by ixigo then shows a day-wise plan, showing what you can do in the morning, afternoon, and evening.

However, if the suggested itinerary doesn't sound appealing, you can again enter a prompt to edit it.

4. iplan.ai

While iplan.ai doesn't mention which AI or machine-learning algorithm it uses, the results are fantastic enough to gloss over that. The app works beautifully on phones to give you a full itinerary for any one city at a time, depending on how many days you have there.

The app first asks you to name the destination city. As far as we checked, iplan.ai works best for popular tourist cities, not offbeat or obscure travel. Next, note how many days you will be there, and then choose your free time each day—a cool step to ensure a better itinerary if you already have some plans, but not a whole days worth.

Tell iplan.ai if you're traveling solo, as a couple, with family, or with friends, and then choose your interest among topics like history, art and culture, nature, entertainment, shopping, food, sports, relaxing, etc. Finally, choose between an economy, normal, or luxury budget.

After a few minutes, iplan.ai gives you a day-wise itinerary for your trip. It's plotted on a map so you can see all the locations, and each point of interest has a brief description along with estimated travel time.

The app has both free and paid plans. With a paid account, you can share the trip plan with your friends and access it offline. Another limitation of iplan.ai is that you can't get an itinerary for a multi-city trip. For now, you'll need to make a plan for each city you're visiting, one at a time.

Download: iplan.ai for Android | iOS (Free, Paid)

5. Curiosio

The easiest last-minute travel plan is to get into a car and drive. Curiosio specializes in helping you plan an itinerary for a road trip to several major countries on all continents. It doesn't cover every single place, but the existing collection is impressive enough.

Curiosio uses its own AI engine, Ingeenee, which is trained on several crowdsourced travel-based resources, such as Wikivoyage, Wikipedia, Wikidata, Freebase, DBpedia, GeoNames, OSMNames, and OpenStreetMap. Through this dataset, it can chart an itinerary that meets your requirements across various parameters.

You can set options for a round trip or a one-way trip with starting and finishing points. If there are any places you want to visit on the way, add them in. Then set the number of travelers, dates of the journey, what vehicle you're using, total budget, and whether you want to visit places that spark curiosity or are obscure. The AI will usually give you multiple plans and routes for these options.

The itinerary includes a map of your route and a day-wise breakdown of where you'll be going and what you'll be seeing. Each point of interest is clickable to find more information about it. There are easy ways to share your itinerary with co-travelers, print it out, or even export it to Google Maps. Curiosio is one of the best road trip planners for your next adventure .

6. Trip Planner AI

Trip Planner AI plans a perfect trip to your dream destination. Begin creating your itinerary by entering the city you wish to visit and traveling dates. You can add multiple destinations here.

Then, select the kinds of activities you prefer, the number of people, and whether you're traveling with friends or family. Trip Planner AI asks you about your dietary preferences and budget.

As an optional step, you can specify the place where you'll be staying so that it creates an itinerary accordingly. If you haven't decided on your lodging yet, you can explore hotels suggested by Trip Planner AI.

Finally, Trip Planner AI generates a detailed itinerary, a map, and basic information about the city you're visiting. For each destination, it provides the details of the place, expected traveling time, and cost. Though it provides a complete plan for your trip, you can manually add or remove activities from your itinerary. You can also invite your friends to edit the itinerary and download it as a PDF.

7. Vacay Chatbot

Vacay Chatbot is not a dedicated itinerary maker but an AI chatbot that acts like your travel advisor. So, you can ask it to give travel recommendations, compare different destinations, and, of course, create an itinerary. If you've previously used AI chatbots like ChatGPT, you'll find this trip planner easy to use.

Just enter a prompt specifying your destination and trip details and ask Vacay Chatbot to create an itinerary. You can include details like your trip duration, budget, preferences, number of travelers, etc. The more details you provide, the better your itinerary will be.

One of the downsides of using Vacay Chatbot is that it doesn't provide a map for your trip. However, you can use these apps to plot your itinerary on a map .

All these travel planning AI apps urge you not to use the itinerary as-is and only treat it as a template or guide to begin planning your trip. This is because they currently have several limitations, like databases that aren't recently updated or require specific prompts from the user.

A real human travel agent will still give you a more customized itinerary, but it will cost you a few bucks. If you want a free base guide, more basic travel planning apps are a good starting point.

Top 10 Itineraries of The Week

Key benefits, personalized itineraries.

Receive travel plans that are specifically tailored to your interests, preferences, and travel goals, ensuring a unique and memorable experience.

Time-Saving

Save hours of research and planning by letting the AI handle the itinerary creation. Quickly get a detailed plan that covers all aspects of your trip.

Comprehensive Planning

Get well-rounded itineraries that include a variety of activities, from sightseeing and adventure to relaxation and cultural experiences.

Discover New Destinations

Explore new places and activities that you might not have considered, broadening your travel horizons and enriching your travel experiences.

Flexibility

Customize the generated itineraries further to suit your specific needs and preferences, giving you the flexibility to adjust plans on the go.

Optimized Travel Experience

Enjoy itineraries that are optimized for time and convenience, helping you make the most of your trip without unnecessary hassle.

Variety of Trip Types

Whether you’re planning a family vacation, a romantic honeymoon, an adventure trip, or a cultural immersion, the tool provides itineraries for a wide range of trip types.

Local Insights

Benefit from local insights and recommendations included in the itineraries, enhancing your travel experience with authentic and off-the-beaten-path activities.

Stress-Free Planning

Reduce the stress of travel planning by relying on AI to create thorough and well-structured itineraries, allowing you to focus on enjoying your trip.

Accessibility

Access your itineraries from any device, making it easy to plan and manage your travels from anywhere, at any time.

• 3 itinerary generations (non-logged in)
• 5 itinerary generations (with free account)
• Up to 14-Day Itineraries
• Maps Integration
• PDF Downloads
• Standard support
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Published on: October 13, 2023   Updated on: February 15, 2024

12 Best AI Trip Planner Tools: Pros, Cons, Costs, and Tips for Use

Author: Melissa Malec

Planning your next trip but need a little help? 

The good news is you don’t have to invest in a travel agent or spend hours doing your own research. The travel industry is now packed full of AI powered tools that can generate personalized travel itineraries which make travel planning faster and your trip more enjoyable.

But with so many on offer, what are the best ai trip planner tools you can use?

As a prolific traveler, I’ve tested dozens to see if they meet my high expectations and help the travel planning process. The result was this list of the top 12. 

Here they are (and what they do best):

• ChatGPT – Best overall for catering to all your travel planning needs
• Wonderplan – Best for breaking down costs and top level information
• Curiosio – Best for planning road trips
• iPlan.ai   – Best for real-time itinerary updates as you travel
• PlanTrip – Best for a multi-destination itinerary
• Plan by Ixigo – Best for ready-made ai generated itineraries
• JourneyPlan – Best for simple travel suggestions by the hour
• Skoot – Best for planning family trips
• Tripbot – Best for eco-conscious travelers
• Roam Around – Best for quick and simple itineraries
• Kayak – Best for booking travel options in one place
• Destinations.ai – Best for figuring out when to travel (US specific)

Keep scrolling to learn more about each tool, its pros, cons, cost and a top tip to help you use it most effectively. 

@topappsai The best AI trip planner tools- pros, cons and cost. Blog is topapps.ai/blog 🤍 #aitiktok #aioftiktok #aitok #aitripplanner #aitravelplanning #aitools #aitool #ai101 #greenscreen ♬ original sound – TopAppsAi

1. ChatGPT – Best overall for catering to all your travel planning needs

There’s nothing quite like ChatGPT on the AI scene when it comes to capabilities and customization of use. 

ChatGPT can help you choose your destination, design a custom itinerary, help you book your transportation and accommodation, as well as plan and stick to a budget. 

What makes ChatGPT standout as a travel planning tool is its ability to iterate on its suggestions and build off what it’s already produced for you so that the trip becomes exactly what you’re looking for. Its plug-ins even help you search the web and pull information from booking sites like Kayak. 

Here’s an example of a Day 2 itinerary it put together for my trip to Rome, including restaurant recommendations, timings, and site visits all organized geographically:

Check out ChatGPT here: openai.com  

Pros of using ChatGPT as an ai travel planning tool:

• Versatile in what aspects of trip planning it can help with
• Easy to use thanks to its chat box interface
• Customizable responses to your travel preferences and needs
• Free version available

Cons of ChatGPT as an ai travel planning tool:

• Can’t be used offline
• Advanced features sit behind a paywall
• Requires prompts to get the best responses

Cost of ChatGPT: 

ChatGPT-3.5: Free 

ChatGPT Plus: $20/month

With ChatGPT plus you get more sophisticated and accurate responses to your queries and you’re able to use plug-ins that enhance the capabilities of the AI. And you can always cancel the subscription for months you know you won’t use it. 

Top Tip for using ChatGPT as a travel planner:

ChatGPT’s output is only as good as the prompts you put in. If you ask it to plan a trip then make sure you get specific and provide all the necessary details it needs to make the trip highly personalized, accurate, and useful. Have ChatGPT ask you any question it needs to have answers to in order to plan your trip effectively. That will help you figure out what information you need to provide.

Not sure where to start?

→ Check out our ChatGPT Travel Planning 2023 Guide. It walks you through the steps and prompts you should be using to get a clear, specific, and accurate travel plan for your next trip.

2. Wonderplan – Best for breaking down costs and top level information

Wonderplan is an AI trip planner that generates personalized itineraries based on where you’re going, what your interests are, and what budget you have. 

This AI travel planner even breaks down that budget with estimates on what you’ll spend on what (accommodation, transportation, food, activities) and provides other helpful information you’ll need such as exchange rates and weather.

The presentation is beautiful and easy to navigate though it’s hard to imagine how I’ll access it on the trip itself.

How does it come up with this? 

The AI tool has you fill out a short form with travel dates, the rough budget for your trip, when you’re going and for how long, who you’re traveling with, activity types you enjoy, and even if you need Halal or vegetarian food.

The itinerary it spins up for you includes links to deals from Viator and other travel companies such as Kayak, Booking, and Trip.com . It also links the activities and destinations on Google maps. 

Check out Wonderplan here: https://wonderplan.ai/  

Pros of Wonderplan as an AI travel tool:

• Has a detailed costs breakdown by category and activity
• Clear categorization and sectioning 
• Includes restaurant recommendations and even takes into consideration some dietary requirements.

Cons of Wonderplan as an AI travel tool:

• The itinerary can’t be edited or adapted once its been created
• There are only 3 budget types to choose from, making the results inaccurate to your spending constraints 
• The itinerary can’t be exported or accessed offline

Cost of Wonderplan: 

Wonderplan is free to use.

Tips for using Wonderplan:

When Wonderplan creates the activities for your itinerary, make sure to do your due diligence and double check its suggestions. The activities are linked to ‘deals’ but you might want to find alternative tours and tickets.

3. Curiosio – Best for planning road trips

Curiosio, out of all the AI travel tools, is the best AI travel assistant for planning road trips. Where it falls short is in its limited database. There are only 24 countries to choose from. I used it to plan a road trip from New York City to San Francisco. 

All I had to do was plug in my starting and destination city, let the tool know if I wanted a round-trip or a one-way itinerary, plug in any destinations I knew I wanted to stop off at, my budget, and some other specifics you can see in the image below.

It then created 4 itinerary options for me.

Within those itineraries, there was a breakdown of the days, budget, and sights. 

There’s also a map and the itinerary can be exported to Google maps for practical use while on the road with all of your destinations plugged in. That was my favorite part.

Check out Curiosio here: https://curiosio.com/  

Pros of Curiosio:

• You can edit the itinerary once its been created for ultimate customization
• Export capabilities into Google maps 
• Multiple trip itineraries are available to choose from
• Makes suggestions for stops you can make en-route
• Helps you find and book accommodation

Cons of Curiosio:

• Currently only has 24 countries in its database
• Limited to road trips
• Doesn’t tell you how long certain activities will take
• No restaurant or food suggestions

Cost of Curiosio: 

Curiosio is free to use. 

Tips for using Curiosio:

If there are destinations you know you want to see on your road trip, make sure to include them in the form you fill out before Curioso creates your itinerary options. 

4. iplan.ai – Best for real-time itinerary updates as you travel

Iplan.ai not only creates your travel plans but it adapts your itinerary on the fly based on your needs, personal preferences, and even current conditions like weather or local events. 

To use it, you’ll need to download the app to your phone. From there, sign up for a free or paid account and follow the prompts so it can build your trip itinerary. 

The only downside is that you have to pay for the AI feature while the free account requires you to manually plan your trip. Either way it’s a helpful and interesting tool to use when planning your trip.

Pros of iplan.ai :

• Updates your plan in real-time based on factors such as weather, events, and preferences
• You can edit and customize the plan as little or as much as you want 
• Easily accessible on your phone while traveling
• Plans are highly personalized to your preferences and trip constraints such as budget and time available

Cons of iplan.ai :

• You’ll need a stable internet connection for the updates to take place
• Paywall makes the AI inaccessible to free users
• You have to create a separate trip if planning on visiting more than one destination on your trip 

Cost of iplan.ai : 

Iplan.ai pro is $3.99 a month. 

That price gets you unlimited access to itineraries and the use of AI in planning your trip.

There’s a free version available but the AI will not create the itinerary for you.

Tips for using iplan.ai :

At only $3.99, the app is worth paying for. Go ahead and buy it for the time you need it. It’s a non-recurring subscription so it won’t renew unless you want it to. 

Make sure to get data for your phone while traveling so the app can work and you can refer back to it. You can get data from a local sim card that you buy or you can use your home provider.

5. PlanTrip – Best for a multi-destination itinerary

PlanTrip is really useful when you’re planning a multi-destination trip, which is something most of the other tools aren’t capable of accommodating. To use it, you’ll fill out a short questionnaire and provide basic travel details. 

The activities it recommends are broken down by price and how long you’ll spend doing each one. It’s loose enough that you have plenty of freedom to add in your own activities and discover things once there. 

It also provides several buttons you can click to get more information such as safety tips, what to pack, hotels in the area, and nearby places to eat. 

The best part? You can easily download it as a PDF that you can revisit digitally or by printing it out and bringing it on your travels. 

Pros of PlanTrip:

• Plenty of helpful information provided to help you prepare for your travels 
• Helps you plan multi-destination travels
• Comes up with places to eat based on where you’ll be on the day
• Includes pricing and time needed at each itinerary activity
• You can save the itinerary as a PDF 

Cons of PlanTrip:

• The number of ads and pop-ups on the site are distracting and frustrating as the user
• It doesn’t provide links to the suggestions it makes
• Can’t make edits to the itinerary once it’s created

Cost of PlanTrip: 

PlanTrip is free.

Tips for using PlanTrip:

Make sure to click the ‘Advanced options’ when filling out the form. That will help the tool make a more personalized and accurate itinerary based on your preferences and trip criteria.

6. Plan by Ixigo – Best for ready-made ai generated itineraries

Plan by Ixigo is great because there are tons of itineraries already built on the app and categorized for you, but it will also come up with a custom one based on your destination and a short prompt. 

You can see an example in the screenshot below:

Once you’ve prompted the tool, the itinerary is created and there are suggestions broken down by time of day and with links that provide more details, including reviews.

Check out Plan by Ixigo here: https://www.ixigo.com/plan  

Pros of Plan by Ixigo:

• There are many pre-planned itineraries you can take inspiration from and use
• It’s free and easy to access ahead of your trip
• You can share it over whatsapp and twitter with others going on your trip

Cons of Plan by Ixigo:

• The suggestions are pretty basic and lack detail 
• Doesn’t take into account budget, who you’re going with, or other important details
• Relies on you to prompt and creates the itinerary on very little information

Cost of Plan by Ixigo: 

Plan by Ixigo is free to use.

Tips for using Plan by Ixigo:

Put in different prompts to get a range of suggestions. 

Then you can pick and choose items from each itinerary you want to do and put the information into a Google doc you can access offline while on your trip. 

7. JourneyPlan – Best for simple travel suggestions by the hour

JourneyPlan is a travel planning AI tool that is simple yet effective. 

It lacks the frills of some of the other tools such as links to book activities directly from the site but it breaks down your days down to the hour so you know exactly what to do when. 

You’ll have to answer a few questions and then it presents you with a custom itinerary. I was surprised how long it took for the itinerary to be created but once I saw it, I did see how it paid attention to my special requests which were: snorkeling activities, temple visits, and smoothie bowls. I just wish it had made suggestions of specific restaurants to try. 

Check out JourneyPlan here: https://journeyplan.co/  

Pros of JourneyPlan:

• Provides specific time suggestions alongside each itinerary suggestion
• You can copy the itinerary easily and transfer it to your own document
• Asks you questions about activities you want to do so that they’re included in the travel plan 

Cons of JourneyPlan:

• Asks for dietary requirements and food interests but doesn’t recommend specific restaurants
• Doesn’t help you find tour providers or make specific suggestions
• You can’t edit the itinerary or request changes without starting the process over

Cost of JourneyPlan: 

JourneyPlan is free to use.

Tips for using JourneyPlan:

JourneyPlan’s response is similar to a very basic output from ChatGPT. You could combine the tools by taking the itinerary from JourneyPlan and asking ChatGPT to fill in the gaps such as providing suggestions for places to eat and group or private tours.

8. Skoot – Best for planning family trips

Skoot makes your family travel planning easier. 

You can use its chatbot or fill out the form to generate a detailed travel itinerary that takes into account the whole family. 

For the chat to work, all you have to do is put in your destination, number of days you’ll be there and the ages of your kids.

You can also use Skoot to recommend activities directly by clicking ‘Activity finder’, ‘Get outdoors’, ‘Rainy days’ or ‘Food and drink’. 

Check out Skoot here: https://skoothere.com/  

Pros of Skoot:

• Suggests activities based on the ages of your children
• You can easily save the itinerary or copy it and paste it elsewhere
• Has tabs to generate rainy day activities, food and drink suggestions, and outdoor activities

Cons of Skoot:

• Only puts activities in the itinerary, not restaurants or accommodation recommendations
• Pretty basic suggestions
• Format is chunky and difficult to skim read

Cost of Skoot: 

Skoot is free to use.

Tips for using Skoot:

You can use Skoot to come up with ideas even when you’re not traveling. 

If you live in a destination like New York City, why not have it make suggestions on a rainy day or to help you get the kids outside?

9. Tripbot – Best for eco-conscious travelers

Tripbot is an ai-powered app helping you get to your destination efficiently while keeping your carbon footprint small. I loved the focus on sustainability.

You’ll need to sign up for an account, and then click ‘Plan My Trip’. The app actually connects you to ChatGPT where it will create a prompt for you and generate your travel plans right there on the site. It then organizes your itinerary by day and plans the best driving route to get you from point A to point B.

Check out Tripbot here: https://www.tripbotapp.com/  

Pros of Tripbot:

• Tripbot prioritizes routes that save you time, making your travel more efficient
• Provides eco-friendly route options, helping you reduce your carbon footprint while traveling
• Tripbot is connected to ChatGPT
• Can plan routes based on driving or using public transport with the option to edit

Cons of Tripbot:

• The itinerary is not hyper-personalized like some of the other ai tools on the list
• Doesn’t help with things like car rentals, hotel rooms, or booking flights
• Fairly limited app with only basic activity planning features

Cost of Tripbot: 

Tripbot is free.

Tips for using Tripbot:

You can download the app to your phone and use it on the go. So no matter where you are, you can find the most sustainable way to get there.

10. Roam Around  – Best for quick and simple itineraries

Roam Around is the perfect tool if you’re looking for quick, straightforward trip planning without any bells and whistles. 

While it may not offer a plethora of features, it does the basics well, making it a reliable choice for simple travel needs.

You’ll get a breakdown of day to day activities and some information around the weather, the language, and the currency. There are links that let you book activities from the itinerary. There’s also a chatbot that helps customize the trip further so you can ask for additional recommendations, for things to be changed, or even for it to connect you with the best deals. 

Check out Roam Around here: https://www.roamaround.io/  

Pros of Roam Around:

• Engaging user-interface, simple to use
• Chatbot lets you further customize the itinerary to your preferences and needs
• It’s fast and can pull together an itinerary in a few seconds

Cons of Roam Around:

• At first, it’s not very personalized because it’s only taking into account your dates and your travel destination
• The features are limited 
• Not suited to plan for multiple travel locations

Cost of Roam Around: 

Roam Around is free to use.

Tips for using Roam Around:

You should definitely use the chatbot feature so that the itinerary becomes more customized to you. Treat him like your personal AI powered travel assistant.

11. Kayak – Best for booking travel options in one place

Kayak is a well-known name in the travel industry, and for good reason. This tool excels in providing comprehensive price comparisons for flights, hotels, and car rentals. 

Its search engine is powered by AI and it will take into account where you’re coming from, where you’re going, and the length of time. It even has a section for business travel and can make suggestions on when the best time to travel is.

Check out Kayak here: www.kayak.com      

Pros of Kayak:

• Kayak scans multiple travel sites to provide you with the best deals on flights, hotels, and car rentals
• The tool offers a flexible dates feature, allowing you to find cheaper options by adjusting your travel dates
• Kayak includes user reviews for hotels and other accommodations to help you make informed bookings

Cons of Kayak:

• Sometimes it’s better to book directly through providers rather than third parties
• The number of options can be overwhelming and cause analysis paralysis when choosing
• You might find cheaper prices elsewhere

Cost of Kayak: 

It’s free to use Kayak. You’ll only need to pay for anything you book through the site.

Tips for using Kayak:

When you find what you want to book, do some research to see if it’s cheaper to purchase elsewhere. 

You can also use Kayak as a plug-in for openAI’s ChatGPT tool.

12. Destinations.ai – Best for figuring out when to travel (US specific)

Know where you want to go but not sure when the best time to travel is? Or maybe you’re looking for specific weather and activities but are unsure of the location?

That’s where an AI tool like Destinations.ai comes in. This tool takes into account your weather preferences and helps you choose when and where to go within the US. It’s niche but it’s useful.

Check out Destination.ai here: https://destinations.ai/  

Pros of Destinations.ai :

• Tells you the best times to travel, potentially saving you money and avoiding crowds
• Great for US travelers
• Helps you plan a trip based on weather and activity preferences

Cons of Destinations.ai :

• Focused only on domestic U.S. travel, making it less versatile for international trips
• It’s only useful when choosing locations and times to visit

Cost of Destinations.ai : 

It’s completely free to use.

Tips for using Destinations.ai :

To get best use of this tool, you’ll want to use it in the early planning stages of your trip. That way you can see when the best time to travel to the destination is and go from there with one of the other tools.

Frequently asked questions about trip planner ai tools 

How to use ai in travel.

You can use AI travel planners to help you: 

• Plan a trip itinerary day by day
• Book accommodation, find flight deals, and suggest or book activities
• Get language and cultural tips 
• Choose your destination and when you’ll go
• Map out a road trip
• Give you helpful information about currency, exchange rate, weather, etc.

And that’s just the beginning of its capabilities.

Is there an AI for travel planning?

Yes. In fact, there are tons of AI for travel planning. This list has the 12 best I found but there are dozens of other tools available that you can sift through and test.

Is there an app to plan a road trip?

Yes, you can use AI tools like Curiosio to plan a road trip. 

It has a database of 24 countries and lets you export the itinerary to Google maps for ease of use while driving.

ChatGPT can also help here if you give it the right prompt but I would recommend an app that specifically caters to road trips. Or you can use both.

Melissa Malec

TopApps writer

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Travel Planning With AI: I Tested It for a City I Know Inside and Out

Thinking of asking AI to plan your next trip? Read this first.

Would you let AI plan your next vacation? For the time-poor among us, it's a tempting proposition.

There's no two ways about it -- planning a great trip is a labor-intensive activity. If you're not careful, you can spend as long reading about and preparing to visit your chosen destination as you'll eventually spend on the ground there. And with many major tourist cities attracting more visitors than ever, even the most seat-of-their-pants kinds of traveler needs to do some preparation.

Over the past year, generative AI (in which you use a prompt to ask an algorithm to generate content -- either text, image or video) has become a publicly available plaything, leading it to be touted as a promising, if often over-hyped, tool to be used in almost any context you can think of. No surprise then that as the world has experimented with OpenAI's ChatGPT tool, many people have been using it to quickly and efficiently create travel itineraries.

A number of travel-specific AI services have sprung up as a result, offering to take on the burden of generating itineraries. But are they any good? Results have been mixed , suggesting there's no black-and-white answer to this question. It's not so much whether you should use AI to plan an itinerary, but how to use it to achieve the best results. 

As someone who lists trip planning as a top-three hobby, I was keen to explore its potential and its limits.

I decided the best methodology would be to use my own city of Edinburgh as a testbed for a three-day trip. I know Edinburgh like the back of my hand, it's a popular destination and it's the ideal location for a quick getaway, even from the US. It's small enough that you won't leave feeling as though you've barely scratched the surface, but big enough and packed with history and tourist attractions so that there's no chance of you finding yourself at a loose end by Sunday afternoon.

I used a range of AI travel tools to build itineraries including ChatGPT, GuideGeek, Roam Around, Wonderplan, Tripnotes and the Out of Office, or OOO, app. Here's how I got on.

Travel itineraries: An art, not a science

A well-constructed travel itinerary is more than just a list of attractions, neighborhoods and local businesses. The best itineraries will string your day together in a way that makes sense geographically and thematically. 

The journey between attraction A and attraction B will be part of the fun, taking you down a picturesque street or providing a surprising view you might not otherwise have seen. It will also be well paced, taking into account that by the third gallery of the day, even the most cultured among us will likely be struggling with museum fatigue.

Very few of the itineraries I asked AI to create for Edinburgh fit this brief. Roam Around, Tripnotes, OOO and Wonderplan clearly had no sense of the geography of the city. ChatGPT and GuideGeek did a much better job of grouping attractions according to neighborhood, building a day around Edinburgh's Old Town, a day around Holyrood and Arthur's Seat, and a day around the New Town area.

See also: Our sister site ZDNet's ranking of the best travel planner apps

The most egregious examples of nonsensical itinerary planning came from OOO and Roam Around when I tested them further by asking them to create larger itineraries for a seven-day trip around Scotland. Roam Around presented me with a fantastic selection of activities and attractions around the country but suggested I drive hours back and forth to Edinburgh for every meal. 

Meanwhile, Day 1 from OOO started me off with breakfast and a graveyard in Edinburgh, a Glasgow Museum at lunchtime, Glenfinnan Viaduct in the Highlands in the afternoon, before staying overnight at a hotel on the Isle of Skye (but with drinks and dinner back in Edinburgh). That's 10 and a half hours of driving, and it only got more exhausting from there.

I approved of the majority of the suggestions AI came up with for Edinburgh, and for Scotland more broadly, both in terms of attractions and local businesses. But aside from ChatGPT and GuideGeek, which were able to create thematically and geographically cohesive itineraries when pushed, the way they were strung together was often counterintuitive.

It's clear that many AI tools are doing little more than aggregating information found elsewhere -- an approach that leaves you with what Lonely Planet Senior Editor Laura Motta describes as "Google Search scrambled eggs." 

Lonely Planet, a sister site to CNET, is currently building its own AI tool, Motta tells me, and is attempting to go beyond simply providing you a jumbled list of must-see places. Instead, it's using preexisting, expertly sourced granular knowledge of destinations to help people build itineraries around must-see attractions.

"Of course you want to see the Eiffel Tower -- maybe don't want to skip that if it's your first time to Paris," Motta says. But the plan is to introduce you to other things in the vicinity of these main sites that you might otherwise have missed -- a bakery perhaps, or a nearby square containing an important piece of history. 

"It's about a balance between seeing the big sites and getting out and doing other things," Motta says. "And AI, at this point, is not great at recommending the other things."

Verify, crosscheck and double source

A hostel wouldn't be on my top 10 list of sites for Edinburgh.

You're likely going to come to Edinburgh (or any city) with a list of sites you absolutely want to see, and any good AI itinerary will help you find these. But not all. When I asked Tripnotes what I should see with a long weekend in my city, the two activities it suggested for the first day were the Fruitmarket Gallery (good, but not exactly a must-see) and a hostel.

I have so many questions, but mainly, where did it get these ideas from? There's not really a way of knowing, which means it's up to you to do some digging of your own. "It's going to be really important to validate some of what comes out, because the recommendations are not sourced particularly well," Motta says.

Even when AI recommends the big attractions, you're not totally safe. Every AI itinerary I generated for Edinburgh recommended a trip to Edinburgh Castle -- predictable, but fair. But did you know that tickets for Edinburgh Castle regularly sell out days in advance? And that if it's too windy, the castle will close -- often at short notice?

Real-time and even recent information are just a couple of things you shouldn't currently expect to find on your AI travel itinerary. The fact that AI uses historical data makes it incredibly backward looking, which Motta identifies as the biggest issue when it comes to using it for travel planning right now. "The guidance is never going to be of the moment the way that you need real-time travel advice to be," she says.

It's going to fall to you to double-check what AI tells you -- and that goes for everything it tells you.

AI doesn't currently take the day's weather into account.

It's particularly important that you don't follow food and drink recommendations blindly. Almost every service I used pointed me to a cafe, bar or restaurant I know to be permanently closed. Additionally, Roam Around suggested I have breakfast at a gastro pub one morning and a pizzeria the following morning -- neither of which opens before midday.

The last few years in particular have seen a huge shakeup in the food and drink industry in cities around the world, with some businesses closing due to the pandemic, others opening and yet more popping up or reopening elsewhere. "There's going to be a lot of inaccuracy in there just because of what's happened in the world," Motta says.

If you're the kind of traveler that likes to visit the hottest new openings in town, you're going to need to resort entirely to your own research. At this time, the AI travel tools available are simply not capable of staying on top of trends -- and they're honest about it.

When I asked ChatGPT about the most exciting new openings in Edinburgh, it responded letting me know that its knowledge is only current up to 2021. It then pointed me in the direction of TripAdvisor, Yelp and local food and travel publications. ( OpenAI announced last week that the new GPT-4 Turbo, the brains behind ChatGPT, is trained on more up-to-date data, up to April 2023.)

The promise of AI is that it can take away the heavy lifting of creating a travel itinerary. The reality, at least for now, is more complicated. AI can provide a great framework for your trip, but it's still up to you to fact-check it before traveling -- so don't ditch the guidebooks, Google Reviews and TikToks filmed in low-lit restaurants just yet.

Helping AI to help you

With generative AI as with so many things in life, you get out what you put in. Asking smart questions can make all the difference to the quality of guidance you will get for your trip.

One common activity suggested by several of the AI tools I used to generate itineraries for Edinburgh was climbing Arthur's Seat -- an extinct volcano that sits right in the heart of the city. I fully endorse its inclusion in any Edinburgh itinerary (it's a unique attraction and the views are magnificent), but where I do take issue is the lack of guidance the AI tools provided when it came to the climb.

Climbing Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags on a good day shouldn't be missed.

The hike up Arthur's Seat is short but strenuous with some scrambling at the top. It's achievable for most people with a good level of fitness, but not for everyone -- and definitely not without appropriate footwear. Several times a year people need to be airlifted off the hillside, and there are many weather conditions I wouldn't personally attempt it in. I certainly wouldn't want to spend the rest of the day afterward, as GuideGeek suggested doing, taking another long walk around a completely different area of the city. Likewise, I wouldn't want to make it the very last thing I did on a day in November, when the sun sets around 4 p.m., as suggested by Wonderplan.

None of the AI tools I used to generate itineraries proactively told me any of this information, but when I asked GuideGeek whether it was safe to climb Arthur's Seat in winter, it gave me great safety advice, which included warnings about the short length of daylight hours in Scotland in winter.

This isn't the only time GuideGeek's chat function served me well. All of the AI tools I used showed me a very similar list of "top" restaurants in Edinburgh to choose from during my trip. Most of these restaurants had Michelin stars, would be considered fine dining or are otherside very expensive -- not accessible options for many travelers. Noting this, I was then able to ask for much more specific advice about small independent restaurants, wine bars and affordable options. The resulting recommendations included many of my favorite establishments from around the city.

These examples demonstrate the importance of asking the right questions. AI does potentially have all of the answers you need, but you might have to dig deep to get them. Taking the time to thoughtfully structure your AI prompts will likely yield more relevant results. Queries you might want to put to any AI itinerary planning tools include asking whether you need to prebook tickets for attractions it recommends, or to help you plan visits to popular tourist sites at quieter times.

Personalization: The next frontier

Not all tools currently available have the capacity to engage in back and forth like chatbots such as ChatGPT and GuideGeek. This does give these services the edge when it comes to itinerary planning, even if it does result in some farcical conversation (such as GuideGeek telling me it was "a fellow fan of the wizarding world" when I asked for Harry Potter recommendations).

Right now, most AI tools fall under the umbrella of generative AI, in that they can generate content -- travel itineraries, for example. But we're also quickly moving toward the adoption of more interactive AI , whereby tools and services are built for us to engage with them through questions and prompts. 

Developments in interactive AI, including more natural conversation skills and the ability of AI tools and companions to get to know our personal preferences could take itinerary planning to the next level. Instead of presenting everyone with roughly the same information, this iteration of AI is much more likely to be able to learn to adapt to your personal preferences.

Travelers come in many different flavors, all with their own preferred approaches to trip planning and their own ideas about what makes a dream vacation. The most underwhelming thing about the Edinburgh itineraries I generated using AI were that they were all fairly generic. ChatGPT and GuideGeek did a fairly decent job of adjusting itineraries when asked to include more nature, more culture or more of a focus on Scotland's whisky heritage, but it felt like an off-the-shelf solution rather than a carefully curated journey tailored to my travel style. 

OOO allows you to add your own stops.

Even when I was presented with a solid itinerary, I still wanted the option to add in my own finds or recommendations from friends -- and some services do allow this. The way some of the travel tools -- OOO in particular -- presented the itineraries using imagery made them visually appealing, and they also left room to manually add in or adjust the trip that they generated for me. 

The plan for Lonely Planet's AI tool, Motta says, is to ensure that people still have a sense of agency when it comes to planning. There's no expectation they'll follow every recommendation. Rather, they'll pick and choose from well-sourced options surfaced by the tool and fill in the rest themselves.

"Do we want to save you time and energy when it comes to planning your trip?" Motta asked. "Yes, absolutely. But I also don't think we want to take the joy out of that process either."

AI tools have some way to go before they're able to read us as well as we can read them. No doubt there will be a point in the future when AI knows our accessibility needs, our penchant for an afternoon nap, our walking speed and our preference for a particular style of wine or art, and can plan for us accordingly.

Just because we're not there yet doesn't mean you shouldn't use AI to help plan your trip -- just so long as you remember it's there to supplement your own research, not serve as a replacement.

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How to use AI to plan your next vacation

AI tools can be useful for everything from booking flights to translating menus.

• Rhiannon Williams archive page

MIT Technology Review 's How To series helps you get things done.

Planning a vacation should, in theory, be fun. But drawing up a list of activities for a trip can also be time consuming and stressful, particularly if you don’t know where to begin. Luckily, tech companies have been competing to create tools that can help you to do just that. Travel has become one of the most popular use cases for AI that Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI like to point to in demos, and firms like Tripadvisor, Expedia, and Booking.com have started to launch AI-powered vacation-planning products too. While AI agents that can manage the entire process of planning and booking your vacation are still some way off , the current generation of AI tools are still pretty handy at helping you with various tasks, like creating itineraries or brushing up on your language skills. 

AI models are prone to making stuff up, which means you should always double-check their suggestions yourself. But they can still be a really useful resource. Read on for some ideas on how AI tools can help make planning your time away that little bit easier—leaving you with more time to enjoy yourself.

Narrow down potential locations for your break

First things first: You have to choose where to travel to. The beauty of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT is that they’re trained on vast swathes of the internet, meaning they can digest information that would take a human hours to research and quickly condense it into simple paragraphs.

This makes them great tools to help draw you up a list of places you’d be interested in going. The more specific you can be in your prompt, the better—for example, telling the chatbot you’d like suggestions for destinations with warm climates, child-friendly beaches, and busy nightlife (such as Mexico, Thailand, Ibiza, and Australia) will return more relevant countries than vague prompts. 

However, given AI models’ propensity for making things up—known as hallucinating —it’s worth checking that its information on proposed locations and potential activities is actually accurate.

How to use it: Fire up your LLM of choice—ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot are just some of the available models—and ask it to suggest locations for a holiday. Include important details like the temperatures, locations, length of trip, and activities you’re interested in. This could look something like: “Suggest a list of locations for two people going on a two-week vacation. The locations should be hot throughout July and August, based in a city but with easy access to a beach.”

Pick places to visit while you’re there 

Once you’re on your vacation, you can use tools like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini to draw up itineraries for day trips. For example, you could use a prompt like “Give me an itinerary for a day driving from Florence around the countryside in Chianti. Include some medieval villages and a winery, and finish with dinner at a restaurant with a good view.” As always with LLMs, the more specific you can be, the better. And to be on the safe side, you ought to cross-reference the final itinerary against Google Maps to check that the order of the suggestions makes sense. 

Beyond LLMs, there are also tailored tools available that can help you to work out the kinds of conditions you might encounter, including weather and traffic. If you’re planning a city break, you might want to check out Immersive View, a feature for Google Maps that Google launched last year. It uses AI and computer vision to create a 3D model depicting how a certain location in a supported city will look at a specific time of day up to four days in the future. Because it’s able to draw from weather forecasts and traffic data, it could help you predict whether a rooftop bar will still be bathed in sunshine tomorrow evening, or if you’d be better off picking a different route for a drive at the weekend. How to use it: Check to see if your city is on this list . Then open up Google Maps, navigate to an area you’re interested in, and select Immersive View . You’ll be presented with an interactive map with the option to change the date and time of day you’d like to check.

Checking flights and accommodation s

Once you’ve decided where to go, booking flights and a place to stay is the next thing to tackle. Many travel booking sites have integrated AI chatbots into their websites, the vast majority of which are powered by ChatGPT. But unless you’re particularly wedded to using a specific site, it could be worth looking at the bigger picture.

Looking up flights on multiple browser tabs can be cumbersome, but Google’s Gemini has a solution. The model integrates with Google Flights and Google Hotels, pulling in real-time information from Google’s partner companies in a way that makes it easy to compare times and, crucially, prices.

This is a quick and easy way to search for flights and accommodations within your personal budget. For example, I instructed Gemini to show me flights for a round trip from London to Paris for under £200. It’s a great starting point to get a rough idea of how much you’re likely to spend, and how long it’ll take you to get there. How to use it: Once you’ve opened up Gemini (you may need to sign in to a Google account to do this), open up Settings and go to Extensions to check that Google Flights & Hotels is enabled. Then return to the Gemini main page and enter your query, specifying where you’re flying from and to, the length of your stay, and any cost requirements you may wish to share. If you’re a spreadsheet fan, you can ask Gemini to export the plan to Sheets, which you can then share with friends and family. 

Practice your language skills

You’ve probably heard that the best way to get better at another language is to practice speaking it. However, tutors can be expensive, and you may not know anyone else who speaks the tongue you’re trying to brush up on.

Back in September last year, OpenAI updated ChatGPT to allow users to speak to it . You can try it out for yourself using the ChatGPT app for Android or iOS. I opened up the voice chat option and read it some basic phrases in French that it successfully translated into English (“Do you speak English?” “Can you help me?” and “Where is the museum?”) in spite of my poor pronunciation. It was also good at offering up alternative phrases when I asked it for less formal examples, such as swapping bonjour (hello) for salut , which translates as “hi.” And it allowed me to hold basic conversations with the disembodied AI voice.  

How to use it: Download the ChatGPT app and press the headphone icon to the right of the search bar. This will trigger a voice conversation with the AI model.

Translate on the go

Google has integrated its powerful translation technology into camera software, allowing you to simply point your phone camera toward an unfamiliar phrase and see it translated into English. This is particularly useful for deciphering menus, road signs, and shop names while you’re out and about. 

How to use it: Download the Google Translate app and select Camera .

Write online reviews (and social media captions)

Positive reviews are a great way for small businesses to set themselves apart from their competition on the internet. But writing them can be time consuming, so why not get AI to help you out?

How to use it: Telling a chatbot like Gemini, Copilot, or ChatGPT what you enjoyed about a particular restaurant, guided tour, or destination can take some of the hard work out of writing a quick summary. The more specific you can be, the better. Prompt the model with something like: “Write a positive review for the Old Tavern in Mykonos, Greece, that mentions its delicious calamari.” While you’re unlikely to want to copy and paste the chatbot’s response in its entirety, it can help you with the structure and phrasing of your own review. 

Artificial intelligence

Why OpenAI’s new model is such a big deal

The bulk of LLM progress until now has been language-driven. This new model enters the realm of complex reasoning, with implications for physics, coding, and more.

• James O'Donnell archive page

OpenAI has released a new ChatGPT bot that you can talk to

The voice-enabled chatbot will be available to a small group of people today, and to all ChatGPT Plus users in the fall. 

• Melissa Heikkilä archive page

A tiny new open-source AI model performs as well as powerful big ones

The results suggest that training models on less, but higher-quality, data can lower computing costs.

Roblox is launching a generative AI that builds 3D environments in a snap

It will make it easy to build new game environments on the platform, even if you don’t have any design skills.

• Scott J Mulligan archive page

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What’s the best AI trip planner?

How to use supercomputing skill to plan your next road trip

By Roadtrippers

Trip planning is time-consuming because of all the dimensions that go into it… Are you a hotel hopper? Or is RVing your jam? 

How can you ensure that you hit all the best stops on your road trip? Where can you find campgrounds or BNBs?

There are other questions too… Who is going with you? Do you need pet-friendly accommodations? What about the best restaurants along your way? 

Depending on your feelings about trip planning, these questions can be fun or scary. Even if you love trip planning, you probably still struggle with FOMO — the fear of missing out on a can’t-miss stop. 

AI trip planners take the guesswork out of travel planning and save you tons of time. This post will help you discover the best AI trip planner for your next journey. 

What’s the Best AI Trip Planner? 

Spoiler alert: Roadtrippers just launched our very own trip planner called Autopilot™ . It combines the power of AI with 38 million real-life human trips. It’s like crowdsourcing your vacation with the extra help of a super-smart computer brain. 

No other AI trip planner has our human element. Here are other features we built in that make Autopilot™ stand out:

– We get geography. The inconvenient truth of many AI trip planners today is that they’ll send you backtracking. True, they might find some of the best stops, but the routes they offer can be less than direct. That’s why the best AI trip planners map out sensible routes with spectacular stops. 

– We build trust with easy ways to verify. Roadtrippers is a community of real people who have been building real trips for over a decade. We’ve helped plan over 38 million itineraries and these users have left reviews all along the way. 

That means you can view real-life reviews of the stops that our Autopilot™ AI trip planner maps out to ensure that humans agree. 

– Travel is art, not science. That’s why Autopilot gets to know your unique travel style. We’ll ask some simple but essential questions, and then, we’ll combine your answers with human experience and supercomputing skill to build your Autopilot™ itinerary. Other AI trip planners seek out generic trip recommendations based only on internet searches. The resulting for-the-masses recommendations won’t be tailored to you. We at Roadtrippers know that travel is personal. That’s why our Autopilot™ AI trip planner uses itineraries from real life trips taken by real life people to create your personalized trip. 

How Do AI Trip Planners Work?

AI trip planners typically work by swiftly surfing the web to create a vacation to match a request you submit. The best AI trip planners will ask you a series of questions to understand where you want to go and how you want to get there. Most only allow you to request something like “Plan a road trip from New York to Chicago.” The challenge with that simplistic AI trip planning approach is that it doesn’t account for essential travel factors like budget, vehicle type, people traveling, and more. 

With the more basic AI trip planners, your trip itinerary is usually based on raw data that the AI tool can find online rather than the human experience or responses that you provide.

Most AI trip planners out there today are also desktop-only. This means you won’t have an AI trip-planning app on your smartphone when you’re on the road. 

That’s why Autopilot™, our AI trip planner, works by asking you a few simple questions to understand your travel style. 

It then combines your answers with real human experiences (38 million human experiences to be exact) to build your ideal trip in less than 2 minutes. 

Autopilot™ lives in the Roadtrippers app, so you’ll have easy access to your vacation itinerary right on your smartphone.

Questions That Your AI Trip Planner Should Ask You

An AI trip planner is only as good as its understanding of your travel style. If it’s not asking you questions like the following, you won’t wind up with a personalized itinerary: 

• What kind of vehicle are you traveling in? If you’re driving a 45-foot Class A RV and your AI trip planner assumes you’re in a smart car, you will have issues.
• Budget? The best AI trip planners are wizards at building the trips to get you the most bang for your vacation buck.
• When do you plan to travel? Without this information, you might get recommendations for events you’d love to go to that aren’t happening when you visit or for seasonal venues that aren’t open.
• Who is going? Pets? Kids? Solo? Couple? This has a big impact on the itinerary. A solid AI planner will ask you about it.
• Where do you want to eat and stay? These sorts of things can make or break a vacation. Make sure your AI planner knows your preferences.

The Best AI Trip Planners Let You Adjust Your Itinerary 

Even with 38 million real-life trips driving your AI-powered itinerary, you may want to make adjustments after Autopilot™ creates it.

No problem. The Autopilot™ AI trip planner is interactive, so you can modify any part of your trip after creating your itinerary. 

Restaurant stops not quite your style? Simply poke around near the stop it found for you and pick out a grub spot more to your flavor. 

RV campgrounds not to your liking? Same deal. You can expand the search and add the spot where you’d like to camp to your Autopilot™ itinerary. 

Need more pet-friendly stops? The Roadtrippers app has the DL on that. Dig into the areas around your Autopilot™ itinerary, and you’ll find plenty more places for Fido to roam. 

Introducing Autopilot: Powered by AI and 38 Million Trips

We haven’t been bashful so far about the fact that we think we just launched the best AI trip planner on the market today. That’s because our AI trip planner, Autopilot™, is powered by the Roadtrippers community. We’ve made a name for ourselves by offering up quirky travel takes, real-life experiences, and human journeys over the road.

All this content gives an especially unique angle on the places that’ll show up in your itinerary. Take our Extraordinary Places Page as an example. These are remarkable stories from journeys that real people have experienced and shared. 

Autopilot asks you a few simple yet essential questions to plan your ideal trip in just a few clicks. The whole process happens in less than two minutes, and you’ll benefit from the human experience of 38 million trips combined with super-computational skills.

Smooth Trip Planning is Here to Stay

Why reinvent the wheel when you can draw on human experiences to help plan your trip? AI trip planners like Autopilot™ take the guesswork out of travel planning so you can spend more time enjoying and less time stressing. 

Even if you love the trip planning part, AI travel planners can help you ensure you don’t miss any must-see stops. Try Autopilot™

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Planning for a vacation is the next best thing to actually going on said vacation. I love opening hundreds of tabs, reading dozens of "must-do" listicles, bookmarking fun and odd things to do, and readying a half-rigid itinerary made of scheduled activities with room for on-the-spot whims. What I don't love is that there's no way to really tie all of this research together. Chrome bookmarks, Keep notes, Gmail, and Maps lists only go so far — I always end up going back and forth between them, fighting against this fragmented approach. Then a few weeks ago, I ran across Wanderlog and let me tell you one thing: If I was to build my ideal travel planning app from scratch, it would be pretty darn close to Wanderlog. Actually no, scratch that, I'd build something similar, but I'd fail to think of at least a dozen awesome extra features that the service already offers.

The web interface is beautifully designed and offers the same breadth of features.

First things first: Wanderlog is free and has no ads (this is its privacy policy ). It's available on Android, iOS, and web, so I can start planning on my computer, continue on my iPad, review on my Pixel, and jump between all platforms without a hitch. It also allows sharing trip plans with your friends or partners with view-only or edit rights, and it live-updates when anyone makes a change, à la Google Docs. It's a smooth app too with neat animations, beautiful iconography and typography, and some layers and gestures.

These are my most basic requirements for a travel app and, believe it or not, many services I tried earlier didn't check all these boxes. Either sharing was impossible or they didn't have web or iOS clients, and those that did showed more ads than a Google Discover feed or had an outdated UI. Beyond these requirements, the app has nearly everything I've wanted in a travel, road trip, and itinerary planner... and more. Just let me walk you through it.

First, I create a trip. It can be something specific like my past weekend in Reims with exact start and end times, or a vague plan like a general list of things I want to do in France. With my trip created, Wanderlog opens up three tabs for me: Overview, Itinerary, and Explore.

Let's be a bit unorthodox and start with the last one. You know those listicles of 10 things you should see in [city-name] that every travel blog has? Wanderlog aggregates a few of them (for larger cities), but it goes the extra mile of parsing the list and finding the places on a map for me. Mind. Blown. Shattered . No more copying and pasting foreign names of places, no more flipping and flopping between each article and Google Maps to figure out if a location could fit with my schedule. Every place has a photo, tags, a short description, Google Maps details (star rating, opening hours, website, phone number). I can immediately see if it's open on Sunday or go to its site, add it to my trip in general or to a specific itinerary day, view it on the map, or get directions to it.

I know I will always do my own research later and find other unique and less generic places to visit, but these parsed lists are a fantastic fool-proof way to get started with any trip planning.

Now, let's go back to the first tab. Here, I can plug in my reservations: flight, lodging, and rental cars. These can be automatically imported from Gmail (which, honestly, I wouldn't recommend — don't let any app read all your emails, period) or forwarded manually from your mail box (better). You can also type the details by hand if you prefer that. For lodging, Wanderlog can also search on Airbnb and Hotels.com for you, helping you plan that as well. There's no flight or car search, though. If I were to make one change to Wanderlog, it'd be to add support for importing train/bus reservations too. These travel methods are widely used here in Europe and it'd be nice to have them fully integrated in the app.

Below that is a box for personal notes. This can be anything I want it to be, and like all note boxes in the app, it supports formatting with bold, italics, underline, bullets, and numbered lists. On the web, you can also indent and add links. So neat.

Then we get to the lists. Things I saved from the Explore tab show up here, but I can also make more lists and manually type the name of places. The data comes from Google Maps, so whatever you can find there is available here. In my experience, only a few characters are necessary to pinpoint any place, and Wanderlog is smart enough to search in the city you're looking at instead of the entire world.

I could spend hours waxing lyrical about how powerful these lists are, but let's just summarize it to a few things: pre-filled short descriptions, data from Google Maps, custom photos, personal notes (with all the formatting), links to search on Google, Trip Advisor, and Maps. But above all, list icons can be customized, so I can have a green mountain for lists of parks and outdoor places, then a blue shopping bag for stores, and a red cup for cafes. Compared to Google Maps, which gives a blue icon for everything, this visual differentiation makes Wanderlog so, so, so much better.

And finally, there's my itinerary. If I know that I'm going to visit a place on a specific day or if I have a reservation somewhere, I can move it out of the regular lists and assign it to a day. Better yet, I can add a specific time and a personal note. This gives me the flexibility that I've always wanted when trip planning: two distinct sections for things that are booked and immutable (itinerary) plus other interesting places that I might visit or not (lists).

Itinerary, maps view with different colors and icons, and maps layers.

On top of all of this, Wanderlog has a map view that shows my hotel(s), lists, and itinerary places with their respective color and icon coding. And I can export that as a Google Maps list and follow it from my main account there. The icon shapes and colors revert to the blue pins on Google, but that's Google's fault, not Wanderlog's. Then when I'm done with the trip, I just unfollow the list and it's gone from Maps and no longer visually crowding it.

Trip exported to Google Maps.

With every trip planning app I had tried before, I always came to the same conclusion: "Just use Google Maps, Rita, it's not worth it." But as I roamed around Reims last weekend, I was surprised to notice that I was still hopping between Wanderlog and Maps, because everything was laid out much better in the former and I needed the directions from the latter. I really loved seeing my plan so neatly organized and it was a joy to use such a simple-looking but also very powerful app.

A few years ago, I had resigned to the fact that the perfect travel planning app for me doesn't exist, but well, here we are. If I were to be very picky, I'd love to have train/bus bookings, to get an itinerary that syncs or exports to a Google Calendar, and to see weather info and currency conversion for the city I'm going to. Being able to share places from Maps or other apps to Wanderlog would be cool too. But these are all extras that would be the cherry on top of a very delicious cake.

My only real wish is for Wanderlog to remain as awesome as it is. I've seen so many services rise and fall, and it would be a heartbreaking shame if this one did too.

Alternate title: The perfect travel planning app doesn't exi-

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