Holiday planning: Would you use AI to help?


However, AI doesn’t always go to plan.

Rebecca Crowe, 29, a freelance writer living in Liverpool, says she often taps into AI to help plan her trips, but proceeds with caution after several unhelpful experiences including a trip to Lecco, a town located next to Lake Como in Italy.

“The experience wasn’t great,” says Crowe. “It listed all the popular stuff to do that you’d find with a standard Google search, and the itineraries didn’t make a lot of logical sense.

“They tried to have us in Milan in the morning and Bellagio in the afternoon, and with the train timetables and ferry schedules, this would not really be feasible. It then had us back in Milan the following day to explore more. Following this itinerary, we’d have spent more time on transport than anything else.”

She’s also referred to AI to find gluten-free restaurants when travelling with a friend who has coeliac disease.

“This pulled back results that were massively out of date and just wrong in some cases. I found myself having to manually cross-reference each suggestion to see if the place was even still open.

“If I’m looking for seasonal things like ferry timetables in the shoulder season [months around the peak season], AI just doesn’t seem to be up-to-date and accurate enough. Same for museums with seasonal opening times.”

Instead she advises people to only use it as a sounding board for broad inspiration. “You can find blogs and websites with complete guides and itineraries that are a lot more reliable and up-to-date. If you want a rough idea of things to do in a certain city, it’s a great jumping-off point, but the amount of fact-checking it requires means that it doesn’t really save you much time in the long run.”



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