For better or worse, AI has seeped into nearly every corner of daily life, often without us even realizing it. (Take my mother, for example, who regularly sends me Instagram Reels without knowing they’re AI-generated.) In the travel sphere, though, this AI creep is starting to feel more insidious.
I’m not here to argue that AI has no legitimate use cases. But working in digital media — and specifically in travel, where AI now touches everything from personalized recommendations to predictive pricing — I share the anxiety many in the industry feel about what comes next. Chief among those concerns is that AI, at least as it’s currently deployed, often seems fundamentally at odds with what travel is meant to represent.
For most people, a trip starts as a tiny spark. You watch the first 10 minutes of the latest season of The White Lotus and spend the next few days humming “Made in Thailand.” Your Instagram algorithm (AI, of course) takes note, and suddenly your feed is flooded with Thailand content. Curiosity nudges you to check flights — and somehow, before you know it, they’re booked. Now comes the fun part.
Or at least, what’s supposed to be the fun part.
For the past year, nearly every morning I’ve opened my laptop to a slightly different iteration of the same headlines: “Plan a Trip Using AI,” “We Let ChatGPT Write Our City Guide,” “These AI Tools Will Change Travel Forever.”
What those stories consistently overlook is this: planning is what helps you truly savor a destination. It builds anticipation, invites connection with travelers who’ve been there before and makes the journey (and the memories you return with) far richer.
There’s even science to support it. A 2014 Cornell University study found that anticipating an experience, like a trip, can significantly boost happiness. A 2002 study from the University of Surrey similarly showed that people are happiest when they have a vacation on the calendar. Amit Kumar, a co-author of the Cornell study, has noted that the joy comes primarily from connecting with others during the planning process.
It’s difficult to quantify how much of that gets lost when an LLM is doing the work for you.
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Of course, some people are simply bad planners, despite their best efforts. For them, there have long been professionals who’ve dedicated their careers to mastering specific destinations and planning trips for others — often from the places themselves.
In 2019, for example, I needed a fully fleshed-out itinerary to secure a visa for Cuba. I turned to ViaHero, a human-based, commission-free travel planning startup that employed locals who worked with travelers to build custom, offline-accessible itineraries based on their interests. The resulting trip remains one of my all-time favorites.
Unfortunately, largely because of AI, this kind of expertise is becoming a dying art. In a story published by Finance Buzz this past fall, travel advisors ranked second on a list of 15 dying professions, just behind factory workers. (Reporters came in at number three. Womp womp.) ViaHero, for its part, shut down in 2023.
During a panel discussion on the topic, Stephen Joyce, global strategy lead for travel at Protect Group, put it plainly: “Travel is an innately human experience. It’s something that as humans we have been doing for thousands of years. We are migratory animals. We are constantly on the move, and for me, travel is about connecting people in the real world.”
Others on the panel argued that AI could level the playing field for small businesses, like independent tour operators, that don’t have access to the resources of massive online travel agencies. Joyce wasn’t convinced. “I worry about the fact that AI is being driven so heavily by profit-driven corporations,” he said. “How they monetize AI will ultimately determine what AI is good for.”
He added, “I think AI will result in the vast majority of humans not trusting content in general, because we won’t be able to know if it was generated by a human or a machine. Large tech companies have convinced people they shouldn’t trust one another — only the algorithm. That’s really scary.”
There are plenty of ways technology has meaningfully streamlined travel. I’m just not convinced this should be one of them. Planning isn’t meant to be a chore; it’s part of the fun. Strip it away and you may gain efficiency, but you lose the heart of why we travel in the first place.
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