AI for travel
Using ChatGPT to plan your next trip
Planning travel can be a daunting maze.
Some tech-savvy travelers are finding success using artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard to inspire and plan their vacations, treating these services like free, on-demand travel agents.
“I liked the idea of ChatGPT because it gives you a very clear list,” says Alpa Patel, an avid traveler in New York City.
Patel has been planning a family trip to Edinburgh, Scotland, for the summer. After getting frustrated with the cookie-cutter travel websites served up by Google, she had an idea: Why not ask ChatGPT for some advice?
1 Set your preferences Patel quickly found a reason why AI chatbots can be useful for travel planning: customization.
Google was giving her endless recommendations for the Scottish Highlands, but Patel’s younger son gets carsick, so she didn’t think it would be feasible for him to spend hours in a car to get there. She found ChatGPT was able to give her reasonable alternatives.
2 Push back and verify Unlike real travel experts, artificial intelligence models can’t get their feelings hurt. That means it’s OK to shoot down ideas you don’t like.
While web search results essentially reset with every new query, the language models powering chatbots can carry on long conversations, remembering and responding to questions and feedback throughout.
And while these models are great at generating ideas and answering simple questions, nothing they say should be taken as, well, true. ChatGPT, for example, is based on historical information up to 2021, so you can’t expect it to provide the latest details, which you might find with a search engine like Google.
3 Get inspired AI chatbots might seem like technological wizards, but they’re still quite limited in what they can do. Don’t expect them to know current flight prices to Dubai or to book a reservation at a restaurant it recommends.
However, some travel companies are working on integrating AI chatbots with the booking process. Expedia recently introduced an integration with ChatGPT that saves its recommendations in the Expedia app.
These integrations are in their early days, so travelers will still have to do the actual booking legwork. But the fun of using AI chatbots lies in the ideas they can generate and the collaborative approach they foster.