The Promise: Your Personal Travel Agent
Artificial intelligence tools, from general-purpose ones like Gemini and ChatGPT to specialised apps like Layla or Stippl, are rapidly changing how we plan travel. Instead of juggling dozens of browser tabs, you can now feed a single, detailed prompt
to an AI. For example, you could ask for a seven-day family trip to Kerala in December on a ₹80,000 budget, focusing on nature and avoiding long drives. The AI can generate a day-by-day itinerary, suggest flights, find hotels, and even list restaurants. This ability to create a structured first draft is AI's biggest strength, saving hours of research and overcoming the initial planning paralysis. It can even suggest destinations you might not have considered based on your preferences.
The Budget: Are the Numbers Real?
This is where things get tricky. When an AI provides a cost estimate, it's not checking live prices. It's predicting a plausible number based on its training data, which might be months or even years old. As a result, AI-generated budgets can be wrong by a significant margin, often underestimating the real cost by 20-40%. These estimates frequently miss crucial expenses like visa fees, travel insurance, airport transfers, checked baggage fees, and local tourist taxes. A flight might seem cheap, but the AI hasn't accounted for the fact it lands at a distant airport requiring an expensive taxi ride. The same goes for hotels, where resort fees and other charges are often excluded from the initial price.
How to Stress-Test the AI's Budget
Never accept an AI's budget at face value. Your first step should be to ask the AI to list all the assumptions behind its estimate, including the travel season and what costs are included or excluded. Next, use its suggestions as a starting point for your own research. Take the recommended flights and hotels and check their current prices on booking platforms for your actual travel dates. Then, manually add the costs the AI likely forgot: insurance, local transport, food, and a buffer for unexpected expenses. Think of the AI's budget as a preliminary sketch, not a final quote. You can also use AI more strategically by asking it to find budget-hacking strategies, like suggesting cheaper alternative airports or comparing the true cost of different airline tickets once fees are included.
The Itinerary: Is It Actually Practical?
AI is excellent at creating logically structured itineraries, often grouping activities by neighbourhood to save travel time. However, these plans can still be unrealistic. An AI might not account for rush hour traffic, long queues at popular attractions, or the simple human need for downtime. It may also suggest activities without checking if they are open on your travel dates or if they still exist at all. Cases of AI “hallucinating” and inventing details, like non-existent restaurants, are well-documented. Therefore, it's crucial to verify the key details. Check the opening hours of every museum and attraction on their official websites. Use Google Maps to check the travel times between locations. Read recent reviews to ensure a recommended hotel is still in good condition and in a safe, convenient area.
Your Role: The Human Co-Pilot
The most effective way to use AI for travel planning is to treat it as a co-pilot, not the autopilot. Use it for brainstorming, discovering new ideas, and creating an initial structure. Let it do the heavy lifting of organising a route and finding potential options. But the final verification and booking decisions must be yours. AI doesn't understand your personal travel style, your walking limits, or whether you prefer a packed schedule or a relaxed pace. The more specific your prompts are, the better the results will be. By combining the AI's broad knowledge with your personal judgement and real-world verification, you get the best of both worlds: a highly efficient planning process and a trip that truly fits your budget and preferences.
