Thinking about using ChatGPT or Claude to plan your next trip? Read this first.
We as travelers are sitting at a threshold — one where we have these new, magical AI tools that promise to find us all the best deals, the best restaurants, the best places. To plan and book our trips end-to-end without a single decision needed from us.
Zero friction.
And it’s easy to be lured in by the promise of a ‘perfect’ trip. Package tours have been selling this dream for nearly a century. In a way, AI is just the next iteration of this: everything planned, structured, and decided without ever needing to have a single conversation with another person.
But what does this actually look like?
Can an AI built on scraped, packaged data really know which places are worth visiting? Does it even have access to the right information to know the restaurants locals love, and whether that neighborhood is going to be a good fit for your family’s needs?
These are the questions we’ll explore here.
I’ll preface this by saying: I’m not in any way anti-AI. On the contrary, I actually use it daily to run business operations, conduct deep research, and even brainstorm ideas.
But after spending months diving into the latest AI travel planning tools: ChatGPT, Claude, MindTrip and others, I have concerns about whether the current tools are actually going to help us with our ultimate goal as travelers: to have better trips.
Let’s discuss.
Photographing an erupting volcano, through the clouds on an unexpected detour to Pucón, Chile in 2015.
How AI Trip Planners Work in 2026
1. AI is trained to deliver answers based on patterns, not experience.
It sounds basic, but it’s worth saying out-loud: AI’s training doesn’t involve visiting destinations, reflecting on its experiences or developing personal taste.
Large language models (referred to as LLMs — the stuff that ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI chatbots are built on) learn statistical patterns from enormous amounts of data called ‘training data’. In the travel space, this could include sources like Reddit, Trip Advisor, and online articles and travel blogs.
Through that training, AI learns how places are described, which experiences are frequently recommended, and what people tend to associate with specific destinations. It can also scrape info from the web, live.
Unlike a traditional search results page, where you can see multiple sources and decide whose judgement to trust, AI often packages that information into one polished, authoritative-sounding answer.
2. Its knowledge reflects what’s already been written about
Popular attractions have thousands of articles, reviews, blogs and social media posts written about them. On the flip side, a family-run restaurant in a small village may have almost no digital footprint — and yet that restaurant is what 77% of travelers claim they’re looking for: authentic experiences representative of local culture [source]
This creates a challenge in what current AI chatbots like ChatGPT and MindTrip can actually discover and recommend. AI doesn’t solve for the absence of good local knowledge that never made it online in the first place.
This is especially worth noting for less represented travelers, like LGBTQ+, older travelers, non-western travelers, multi-generational families and under-reported regions.
It is also worth keeping an eye on this as AI shapes the future of content online.
Authoritative sources like travel blogs and reputable travel publications are already failing to update as frequently as AI has dramatically disrupted their ads-based business model that incentivizes them to keep things up to date (to a blogger, a link click means on-page ad revenue, but also opportunities to earn via affiliate links).
When more travelers get their answers directly from chatbots, the writers providing that information do not get compensated. And as less up-to-date sources are available the gaps will be filled by forums like Reddit and TripAdvisor that bring their own biases.
Travel Planning before AI / Photo Credit: Ian Dooley via Unsplash
The Risks of Letting AI Take Over Your Trip Planning
3. AI can reinforce over-tourism.
If millions of people ask the same AI systems where to go, and the systems repeatedly surface the same famous attractions, those recommendations can concentrate tourism rather than distribute it, compounding the problem of over-tourism in certain cities.
Competing opinions and differing perspectives disappear and you’re left with a much narrower recommendation, masquerading as expert judgement.
A 2026 study examining recommendations for German Christmas markets found AI leaned toward a narrow set of iconic destinations instead of promoting the full range of available markets [source]. By comparison, last week I sat down with Alexandra, an expert on European Christmas markets. Her top picks were almost never even surfaced by AI.
Crowds pushing across a bridges in Venice, one of many cities in Europe struggling with over tourism. Photo credit Levi van Leeuwen via Unsplash.
4. AI doesn’t inherently know what’s true
Generative AI can produce plausible but false information, including invented attractions, incorrect details or nonexistent businesses. And unlike a traditional Google search result, a generated answer can conceal the uncertainty behind a confident narrative.
A study earlier this year found that hallucinations in AI-generated itineraries undermined perceived accuracy, usefulness and trust [source].
While hallucinations have improved, AI is by no means foolproof; an AI itinerary can look great…and still send you somewhere that doesn’t exist.
5. Yesterday’s information can ruin tomorrow’s trip
Train times change. Restaurants close. Attractions introduce reservation requirements and prices fluctuate with the seasons.
Travel information is only useful if it remains accurate, and as of today nothing exists in the tourism industry that acts as a live database or builds an actual source of truth, outside of the GDS for flights.
This is important because even AI systems with web access can pull in incomplete, outdated or conflicting information. Google’s own research acknowledges that LLMs struggle with real-world logistical constraints such as bus fares, train schedules and opening hours [source].
6. AI can create itineraries that work on paper but not in reality
A day with five attractions, two restaurants and a scenic detour might look perfect, but how much time is spent traveling between them? Is a one-hour lunch in a small seaside town actually realistic? And can you really make it across the city in 30 minutes when it’s 100 degrees and you’ve got your aging parents in tow?
Today’s AI chatbots will always optimize for giving you what you say you want rather than what works best in practice.
This is a different problem from inaccurate information: even when every attraction exists and every opening hour is correct, the combination may be impractical. Just because something can be done, doesn’t mean it will be a good experience.
Speaking with travel journalist and Rome local, Laura, she’s seen a massive increase in travelers taking absurd day trips that leave them spending the majority of the day on crowded busses simply because their AI suggested that Pompeii could be reached from Rome in a day (it can…if you don’t mind seeing more of the highway than anything else).
AI vs Humans: who planned it better?
7. AI doesn’t have first-hand experience
We touched on this above. A chatbot has never sat at the corner table of a particular restaurant, visited the local market on a rainy Tuesday, or walked down a neighborhood’s winding streets alone after dark.
It can relay people’s posted observations, but it has no personal travel memories or sensory experiences. Describing an experience is not the same as having experienced it.
This distinction matters when a traveller asks questions like:
“Is the restaurant worth the detour?”
“Does this beach feel overcrowded in August?”
“Which neighborhood has the atmosphere I’m looking for?”
An AI built on information from countless undisclosed sources will never actually know what something felt like, it can only parrot the judgement of others.
8. AI removes the spontaneity that makes travel memorable
AI is very good at helping people construct structured plans. But an itinerary that accounts for every hour can crowd out opportunities for unexpected discoveries.
On the flip side, a local may tell you to leave an afternoon unplanned, follow a particular walking route, or caution that you’re likely to want a few hours just to wander a nearby festival.
And it’s not just about leaving space, it’s about the intuitive knowing that comes from being a living, breathing human experiencing a city day in and day out that prompts someone to point you in a particular direction that you won’t get when you’ve optimized every moment in advance.
9. AI often misses the unwritten context, and skips over the thing you didn’t know to ask for.
A local might tell you that the best time to visit a market isn't when it opens, but an hour later when the vendors have settled in, and to stop by Maria’s stall after lunch to meet her cat Rex.
AI on the other hand can only personalize to the questions you ask, and the preferences you share with it — either directly or over time. You can tell it you like food, art and cute cafes, and it will produce an itinerary around those categories. But it won’t inject it’s personal favorite cocktail bar or it’s favorite dog park for celeb sightings…because an AI doesn’t have personal favorites.
Great travel recommendations depend on your preferences in the moment: why you’re going, who you’re traveling with, and what your hopes and fears are — not just for the trip, but where you’re at in life overall. A system designed to answer your questions isn’t set up to give you the side-quest you wish you knew.
Local shop in Naxos, Greece. Photo credit: Teal Thomsen
The Hidden Cost of AI in Travel
10. AI recommendations often reflect commercial incentives & other biases you can’t see
Not every travel recommendation is neutral. Have you ever been to a restaurant that offers you a discount in exchange for 5 stars on Google? I have — this happened to me in London just last week. Unsurprisingly, it quickly became a top ranked spot.
Some websites and blogs earn money through advertising, booking commissions, sponsorships, referrals or preferred commercial relationships. While it’s often disclosed in the article itself, these nuances tend to get lost in AI and places can appear more frequently not because they are genuinely well liked, but because they’ve paid for optimization of placement and brand.
Ever wonder why a particular big-name hotel appears everywhere, while a family run guest house is harder to find? Commission structures drive incentive to promote some properties over others, and the added promotion in turn can make it appear popular.
This mostly harms small and independent local businesses, and isn’t limited to AI systems. However, here AI takes an existing bias and amplifies it.
Another example of hidden bias: certain Reddit communities, are highly moderated and end up only surfacing the opinions of those who have learned how to navigate the system. Fun fact: to even share your opinions or questions on Reddit’s main travel community you need to have built up a hefty history of ‘karma’ points. This tends to favor a younger, more male demographic who have the tech know-how and spend time on Reddit’s platform already.
11. AI can extract value from hard-earned local knowledge without rewarding the people who shared it
The info that fuels AI tools today comes from decades of articles, descriptions, reviews, photos and knowledge that has been shared online by people and communities — most often without compensating those contributors.
This is very different from the pre-AI era where bloggers generated ad revenue from page traffic, which we touched on in #2, and raises important questions about consent, attribution and how these systems can actually be sustained in the long-term.
Not every AI system operates identically, and some publishers have licensing agreements. But rarely do these go deep enough to include independent bloggers and publications, and even where there are agreements in place it doesn’t come close to replacing the revenue lost by all of the people now bypassing the site.
Over time this will degrade the whole system — without an incentive to share, the internet will shift away from those with deep, lived personal experience, nuanced takes and genuine local favorites. Communities lose out on having a voice and a way to participate in the multi-trillion dollar tourism economy, but so do travelers as the quality of information available becomes less nuanced, and more driven by sponsorships and those with budget to pay.
This is comes at a time when 73% of travelers actively want their spending to benefit local communities [source].
So, what does this all mean?
Is AI a magic bullet for travel planning? Not as it is today. Right now, AI planners are just another layer on top of the same old internet, but without the compensation mechanisms that powered the previous version of the travel internet.
Will it get better? I believe so, yes. But that will require a radically different approach, one that considers full-stack how to build a system that benefits travelers AND locals.
To really make AI truly useful for planning trips we need to first focus on the unsexy side: the data. How do we get the information that travelers need, in a way that respects local communities and compensates experienced locals and experts for their knowledge. Only then will we be able to pair the up-to-date, accurate info that we as travelers actually want and need, with the necessary incentive to reliably deliver it.
This is why, at Ella Travel we are starting with the women who hold this knowledge.
Subscribe below and stay tuned for more updates to come on how we are building a different, better future for travelers and locals.
Looking for a better way to plan? Connect with an Ella Advisor for in-destination, local intel. Ella’s local experts are fully verified and independent; they will never receive a commission for recommending one place over another.
✨ The most documented places aren’t always the best.
✨ The most efficient trip isn’t necessarily the most memorable.
✨ AI can give you a convincing itinerary without actually knowing whether it’s a good trip.
What do you think? Share your thoughts below. 👇
