You’ve heard a lot about AI recently. How it promises big, potentially scary, changes to everything from jobs to the arts (including the snappy photos included in this article!) to, yes, even travel. Here at Escape Artist, we’re following the industry closely to keep our fingers on the pulse of all the ways AI, and tech in general, could impact your plans to travel or live abroad.
In the coming months we’ll be covering more stories about the many existing and emerging AI providers, what they offer, where they excel, how they come up short, and all the fast moving changes this exploding industry promises to deliver in the coming months and years.
To kick off our coverage, we dig into a survey of current AI tools and how they might be super helpful when you plan your next trip, or, conversely, how they might suck you into some surreal fever dream. So just remember, like any developing young mind, AI can often be frivolous, at times imperious and sometimes just plain wrong. You’ve been warned.
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Our future AI overlords have a few travel recommendations
AI is said to be coming for all of our jobs. Are travel agents and tour guides the next to go?
A slew of recent articles have embraced the idea of generative AI as travel guide, and nearly 40 percent of travelers say they’re interested in using AI tools to help plan their journey.
It’s easy to see the temptation. Today’s glut of travel writing and social media posts makes it all but impossible to know who to trust or when to stop digging. But, which AI tool should you use? We did a survey of a few of them so you don’t have to.
ChatGPT, while just an algorithm, offers the advantage of being free and instantaneous. It might also be described as a collection of everything ever written online about travel and related topics, so it’s knowledgable.
It’s also far from the only option. In addition to mainstream AI platforms, such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, travel sites like Expedia, Kayak, TripAdvisor, Lonely Planet, and Booking.com offer AI-powered tools to help plan trips. And earlier this year, Google announced plans to develop its own generative AI travel tool. More are sure to come.
So do they deliver the goods? Recently a New York Times’ travel writer used three AI tools to plan a Norway trip and seemed mostly pleased with the results, but missed a certain element of randomness. Another travel writer relied on ChatGPT to plot a day in Austin, Texas, and found that AI had difficulty grasping how long it took humans to get from place to place.
We ran a few tests of our own. A request on Vacay for one day off-the-beaten path in Paris swapped out iconic tourist destinations for eclectic recommendations like a neighborhood bistro and a defunct railway line repurposed into walking trails. A five-day itinerary from Mindtrip for the South Pacific archipelago of Tuvalu, the world’s least-visited country, offered surprising detail, including a plan to visit multiple islands and snorkel near a major hotel.
A ChatGPT itinerary for five days on the Greek island of Chios highlighted several popular towns and tourist sights. It also advised the traveler to visit a taverna every evening without naming a single one, making it seem more like a boozy friend than an informed advisor. A follow-up query inquiry, thankfully, delivered a list of ten tavernas. Several were highly rated, a couple had shut down, and one may never have existed. When using generative AI, there’s always the risk of so-called hallucinations. You’ve been warned.
Our verdict? There’s no denying the advantages of a free and instantaneous travel advisor, and today’s AI tools, which are sure to improve in the days ahead, are great for gaining an overview of hotspots and lesser-known sights and destinations. But relying entirely on AI to plan your trip could be both risky and unwise. Setting aside hallucinations, it’s the unexpected human elements—like random surprises and tips from friends—that make our journeys most memorable.
