When AI powered search engines like ChatGPT came out I was skeptical. I tried asking ChatGPT silly questions, like who would win in a fight a Viking or a Samurai? But when I was planning my limited time vacation to Japan with many activities I wanted to do/see I realized the power of carefully asking ChatGPT questions to help plan your trip itinerary. I used it to help with my itinerary to Japan, Chicago and for our upcoming trip to Bahamas. Now it isn’t an end all be all and you still need to do your own research but ChatGPT and other AI chat bots can definitely offer some pointers and save some time rather than browsing numerous websites.
Here are some pointers when using ChatGPT to help plan your itinerary:
- Be specific, tell the both the dates, how long and where you are staying, some specific activities you want to do and other ideas of things you want to do (ex. Mention that you want to learn about the city, do something adventurous, etc.).
- Research ahead of time, know a few things you absolutely want to do.
- Ask about transportation.
- Ask the chat bot to change your itinerary if you don’t like it and add things to refine it.
- Once you have a good itinerary refine it to your liking.
- You are limited how many times you ask it questions, it only happened once to me, but it told me to try back in 5 hours, unless I wanted to pay for the upgraded version. For now, I won’t be paying and will use it on a limited basis as a supplement to my research.
- Use AI as a supplement to your research which can definitely streamline the process and help you focus on the most enjoyable parts of planning, like chosing a sweet hotel, booking your tickets to a sporting event and researching the things that were the reasons for the vacation in the first place.
It won’t be perfect and you still need to do some planning on your own but ChatGPT can give you a good itinerary and add some things if you’re looking to fill up your trip and stay busy.
ChatGPT is very good at efficiently planning and grouping activities that are located in the same area. This can save you time instead of looking up each activity/tourist attraction on the map and trying to group them together efficiently. Coupled with asking the bot about transportation you can plan a pretty time efficient trip where you can see and do a lot of things. And, if you tell the bot what types of food you want to eat, it can give you lists of restaurants that you may wish to try and which ones would be best suited based on where your activity is for that day.
What ChatGPT won’t do:
- It isn’t good for choosing a hotel, select that on your own and tell ChatGPT where you are staying when you are using it to help with the itinerary.
- It won’t scan reviews for you, for instance if you get it to suggest hotels it will inform you to read reviews. You can’t ask it to choose a hotel with no reviews about having bed bugs (this is an important one).
- It won’t plan the perfect trip and your itinerary to a tee so you need to put in some of your own work.
ChatGPT was excellent for Chicago where we turned our vacation into a food tour, eating iconic Chicago foods and going to famous restaurants. You can read about it here or see the vlog. It helped us squeeze everything into our short 4 night vacation and worked like a charm. I was also able to find a specific skyline view in the city from a television show so I could recreate a picture from the series. This was something I couldn't find on google myself.
The chat bot was also good at helping decide the days and order of where we travelled for our week in Japan. I could have figured it out on my own, but ChatGPT helped me decide to do 3 days in Tokyo, take the train past Kyoto to Osaka for a night then make our way back in the direction of Tokyo for 2 nights in Kyoto followed with a final night in Tokyo. Originally, I was going to go to Kyoto first, but then we would have had further to travel for our last night in Tokyo before we flew home.
For our upcoming trip to Bahamas, I got some ideas of beaches to go to in Nassau on certain days coupled with certain activities and it helped me plan my transportation in Toronto (for our 24 hour layover), for a couple nights in Fort Lauderdale/Miami and in Nassau, Bahamas.
A side note here, I used another form of AI to design my logo for this website. I used Bing Image Generator. There are limits what you can do, and again it will take a few tries, but if you tell it what you want and are specific after a few tries you can get a pretty good image/logo. It isn’t great with spelling though, and for many of the good logos it generated it spelled “Restless Explorer” wrong, so logos were scraped.
Again, it isn’t perfect but the strengths of ChatGPT and other AI chat bots are helping you plan out your itinerary efficiently and giving suggestions of activities and tourist things to do without having to use google maps to figure out which activities and restaurants to match together on certain days. If you tell the chat bot your starting point it can plan the most efficient route around the city. ChatGPT really helped make our 4 night food tour and vacation in Chicago epic and jam packed with activities and restaurants we wanted to eat at. Hopefully our upcoming trip in Bahamas will go just as well too! And remember don’t forget to ask the bot to refine the itinerary, and tell it what you want to change, it may take 2-3 tries but coupled with a little bit of research ChatGPT is the perfect travel agent.
Below are images from our last two trips which ChatGPT helped plan and the logo, credit to Big Image Generator.
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