AI can plan the perfect trip now. Beautiful.
But let me ask you one thing: Is the most perfect trip the one we always remember?
I so clearly remember the time when planning a trip was exhausting but fun. It meant something when you opened 17 tabs, asked a friend who had been to Morocco 6 years back, read a blog written by someone whose definition of “walking distance” was deeply concerning, and eventually accepted that at least 30% of the trip would have to be figured out after landing.
Now, all you have to do is open ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Grog or some random AI Travel planner and type:
“Give me a five-day trip plan in Morocco. I like coffee, local neighbourhoods, local food, not-too-touristy places, and I hate waking up early.”
Just a few second and thinking... later, boom! There it is.
Day 1.
Breakfast here.
Train there.
This neighbourhood at 11.
Lunch at 1.
Hidden cafe at 3:15.
Sunset from this exact spot.
Damn! That's freaking incredible and we both know that at least 30% of the world's population has realised this.
AI travel is Exploding in 2026
According to Google’s 2026 travel search data, search interest in “AI travel assistant” and “AI concierge” has grown 350% over the past year.
Searches for “AI flight booking” jumped 315%, while “how to use AI to find flight deals” was also trending.
And earlier this year, Google reported that searches for “AI travel planner” reached an all-time high in January 2026. See Google’s January AI travel-planner data
So this isn’t some future version of travelling that we need to speculate about.
It’s already happening.
Google is now even integrating travel planning deeper into AI-powered Search, including itinerary building, live flight and hotel information, price tracking and hotel booking. See Google’s latest AI travel features
And the numbers become even more interesting when you look at what travellers actually want AI to do.
What Travellers Actually Use AI For
For its 2026 AI Trust Gap research, Expedia Group commissioned YouGov to survey more than 5,700 adults across the United States, United Kingdom and India.
The study found:
- 53% are comfortable letting AI suggest travel options.
- 42% use or would use AI to monitor prices.
- 40% use AI to help build itineraries.
- 48% said AI saves them time and helps them discover places they might not otherwise have found.
Read Expedia Group’s full AI Trust Gap research
And if you were to ask my expert opinion, it makes complete sense.
Planning travel can really be exhausting. You start by casually searching for a hotel. Forty-five minutes later, you are investigating whether Room 407 receives six minutes less sunlight than Room 512.
Come on, neither of us needs this, nor do we deserve this.
If AI can tell me which neighbourhood makes sense, whether the airport train runs late, which museum needs advance booking, and whether I’m attempting to schedule three things on opposite sides of a city on the same afternoon...
Please.
Take the job.
But there’s something else in those numbers that I find even more interesting.
Travellers Want AI to Help. They Don’t Necessarily Want it to Take Over.
For all the excitement around AI travel planning, people are still surprisingly cautious about giving it complete control.
In the same Expedia study:
- 68% said they would rather book with a trusted travel brand than through an AI chatbot or agent.
- 66% said they would not trust AI to purchase or book something on their behalf.
- Only 8% felt comfortable actually booking through an AI platform.
And among respondents in the US and UK, just 8% currently relied on AI chatbots and agents when planning trips, compared with 59% using search engines and 49% using online travel agencies.
See the full Expedia survey methodology and results
So AI travel planning is growing incredibly fast. But growing incredibly fast is not the same as replacing everything that came before it.
There seems to be a very human line developing:
Help me decide. Don’t decide everything for me.
And I think there’s something important hiding inside that instinct. Because my concern isn’t that AI will destroy travel. My concern is almost the opposite.
It might become extremely good at it.
AI is a Genie When It Comes to Removing the Annoying Parts of Travel
There is a lot of travel friction that deserves to die.
Trying to understand an incomprehensible transport website.
Finding out whether your train leaves from Station A or the completely different Station A International Terminal West Building that somehow has the same name.
Comparing 47 hotels.
Working out whether a neighbourhood is actually central or whether the hotel description is using the word “central” with tremendous optimism.
Finding opening hours.
Understanding public transport.
Creating a rough route.
Comparing options.
Translating things.
AI bro, please optimise all of that.
Missing a flight isn’t character development.
Food poisoning isn’t cultural immersion.
Standing outside the wrong station at 1:13 AM while your phone has 3% battery does not make you a more interesting traveller. It mainly makes you angry.
But I think we make a mistake when we treat friction and uncertainty as the same thing.
Friction And Uncertainty Are Completely Different
Friction is spending two hours doing something that should have taken ten minutes.
Uncertainty is leaving Tuesday afternoon slightly empty because you don’t yet know what Tuesday afternoon will become.
Friction is getting stranded because you didn’t check the last train.
Uncertainty is getting off one station earlier because the neighbourhood outside the window looked interesting.
Friction usually gives you stress.
Uncertainty occasionally gives you a story.
And AI travel planning is becoming very good at eliminating both.
Maybe we should only eliminate one.
Because when I think about the trips that stayed with me, a suspicious amount of what I remember wasn’t on the itinerary.
It was what happened around it.
The cafe we entered because it started raining.
The street we discovered after walking the wrong way.
The restaurant somebody told us about that afternoon.
The person we met because we had time to sit somewhere twenty minutes longer than planned.
The place we went back to for no reason other than: “I liked it there yesterday.”
These would be terrible itinerary items. Imagine your AI trip planner confidently generating:
2:40 PM: Become mildly lost.
3:05 PM: Enter shop for no particular reason.
3:22 PM: Have an unexpectedly lovely conversation with a stranger.
4:10 PM: Completely abandon original itinerary.
★★★★★
Would totally recommend.
Some of My Favourite Trips Would Fail an Optimisation Test
I’ve lived the opposite of the perfectly planned trip.
Years ago, what was supposed to be a small trip somewhere near Pune somehow turned into three college boys heading to Goa with no tickets, no hotel booking and essentially no plan.
We ended up with a flooded resort room, an unexpected hotel upgrade, my first spa, a casino jackpot and a trip that lasted longer than it was supposed to.
None of that survives an optimisation algorithm particularly well.
It remains one of my favourite travel stories.
Read: We Went to Goa for 4 Days and Came Back Much Later
And then there are moments where the value isn’t unpredictability at all.
It’s human knowledge.
On another trip, I trekked with a 72-year-old local guide named Lakshman who had been doing those mountains for 38 years.
The rest of us arrived with equipment, shoes and preparation.
Lakshman arrived in Paragon chappals.
And casually walked up the mountain like gravity was a suggestion.
You can map a trail.
You can optimise a route.
But there’s a different kind of understanding that comes from knowing one mountain for nearly four decades.
Read: We Were Trekking. Lakshman Was Strolling.
That distinction matters to me.
Technology can give you information about a place.
People, repetition, wrong turns, and time give you a relationship with one.
Are AI Travel Planners Going to Make Us All Take the Same Trip?
This is the part I keep thinking about the most.
AI doesn’t even have to recommend bad places for something strange to happen. Imagine it becomes extremely good at recommending the right places.
The highly rated bakery.
The perfect coffee shop.
The photogenic neighbourhood.
The restaurant everybody agrees is authentic.
The viewpoint with the best sunset.
The perfectly efficient walking route between all five.
Individually, every recommendation can be excellent.
But if millions of travellers begin asking variations of:
“Give me the best non-touristy things to do in Paris.”
there is an obvious paradox hiding in there.
How many people can be sent to the same “non-touristy” place before something changes?
We already had this problem before AI.
Blogs did it.
Instagram did it.
TikTok does it at frightening speed.
AI may simply become the most efficient recommendation layer we’ve ever built.
And suddenly our individually personalised trips could begin sharing surprisingly similar bones.
Different traveller.
Different dates.
Different hotel.
Same bakery.
Same street.
Same sunset.
Same “hidden gem.”
That doesn’t mean we stop asking for recommendations.
I certainly won’t.
But maybe there should still be some space between finding something and being told exactly where to find it.
Those experiences don’t always feel the same.
We Escaped Our Calendar And Built a Prettier Calendar
There is another irony in all of this.
Why do you and I usually travel?
Mainly to temporarily escape our routine, right?
And then we create this:
9:00: Breakfast
10:30: Museum
12:30: Lunch
2:00: Old Town
4:00: Cafe
6:17: Sunset
8:00: Dinner
Congratulations.
We have escaped our calendar by creating a prettier calendar.
And I don't mean to demean it in any way because I understand that travel costs money.
Flights are expensive.
Hotel nights are limited.
You may never return to that city again.
Nobody wants to reach the airport on the final day and discover that the one place they would have loved was seven minutes from the hotel.
Planning gives us security. Optimisation gives us the comforting feeling that we are not wasting the trip.
But maybe a trip does not need to be fully utilised to be fully experienced. Those are different things too.
How to Use AI for Travel Planning Without Letting it Plan the Entire Trip
I don’t want less technology when I travel. I want technology doing the right jobs.
Let AI handle logistics
Use it to compare neighbourhoods, organise research, understand transport, identify booking requirements and make sense of twenty different options.
Ask for choices instead of one perfect itinerary
Instead of:
“Plan my perfect four days in Rome.”
Try:
“Give me three very different neighbourhoods I could spend an afternoon exploring and explain what each one feels like.”
Now AI is giving you possibilities. You’re still travelling.
Plan anchors, not every hour
Book the things that actually need booking.
The museum with limited entry.
The train.
The restaurant you desperately want to try.
The rest can breathe.
Leave one block of time deliberately empty
An afternoon without an assignment is not wasted time. Sometimes it’s where the trip happens.
Verify anything consequential
AI can help enormously with travel research, but opening hours, visas, transport changes, prices, ticket rules and reservations should still be checked against the relevant official or live source before you depend on them.
The goal is not:
“Tell me exactly what to do.”
Maybe it’s:
“Help me understand my options so I can decide what happens next.”
So, is AI Good for Travel Planning?
Yes.
Absolutely
I’ll always use it.
But I will use it to ask the right questions, rather than making it the trip leader.
Tell me which neighbourhood makes sense.
Help me compare flights.
Explain the metro.
Translate the menu.
Tell me that the museum I want to visit is closed on Tuesday before I enthusiastically travel across the city on Tuesday.
Save me from preventable stupidity.
Just maybe don’t tell me everything.
Leave one meal undecided.
One afternoon open.
One street unexplained.
Go back somewhere simply because you liked being there.
Ask somebody where they eat.
Take the slightly longer road occasionally.
Allow one moment where nobody in the group knows what happens next.
Because perhaps the goal of AI travel planning should be to remove the boring uncertainty from travel without removing the beautiful uncertainty with it.
A perfectly optimised trip sounds amazing, but I wouldn't want to come back home with that. I would much rather come back with a story that starts like...
“So this wasn’t actually the plan…”
AI Travel Planning: Quick FAQs
Can AI plan an entire trip?
Yes. Modern AI travel planners can generate itineraries, suggest hotels and restaurants, compare locations and increasingly work with live travel information. Google, for example, now offers AI-powered itinerary, flight and hotel planning capabilities directly through Search. See Google’s current AI travel-planning tools
How many travellers use AI for trip planning?
In Expedia Group’s 2026 survey of more than 5,700 adults in the US, UK and India, 40% said they use or would use AI to help build itineraries, while 53% were comfortable letting AI suggest travel options. See Expedia’s research
Is AI replacing Google Search for travel?
Not yet.
In Expedia’s survey, among US and UK respondents, 59% used search engines for travel planning, compared with only 8% relying on AI chatbots or agents. AI usage is growing extremely quickly, but traditional search still plays a much larger role. Read the full study
What should I use an AI travel planner for?
AI is particularly useful for early research, comparing destinations or neighbourhoods, organising itineraries, understanding transport options, generating ideas and monitoring prices.
The trick is probably not letting efficiency become the whole point of the trip.
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