Holiday planning - Absolute game changer of a short cut

[Raquelos]

I posted this on another thread but it was a bit off topic and I am so delighted by it that I wanted to spread the word. For anyone who hasn't figured this out yet, I am going to share something I have just discovered, which has blown my mind a bit.

Go on to chatGPT (it's free to sign up) and ask a question like this, obviously with your own specific details:

"Give me a 2-week itinerary based around Trier in Germany. I like Roman ruins, I like wine, I like hiking, and I like good restaurants. Include recommendations for 5 different hotels at different price points with links, and give me restaurant recommendations for restaurants with different cuisines. Include links to all activities, restaurants and hotels"

Oh my God! It is an actual game-changer. It gives such a great selection of info on things to do and see, and places to stay, and you can follow up with clarification questions. I swear, this takes so much of the legwork out of looking for info. I love it.

Happy holiday planning 🙂

I'll give it a go I'm going to be looking to book for the summer over next couple of weeks.

Maybe my prompts weren't specific enough, but I asked it for a weekend itinerary to minimise journeys between key sightseeing spots and it wasn't nearly as useful as I expected. So double check everything!

Fair enough. You can ask follow-up questions or ask for more info on chatgpt I don't know if that would help your results get better.

Given the totally ridiculous itinerary someone posted for its ideas on a short break in Iceland (including separate day trips to the north and east coasts, both about 10 to 15 hour round trips from Reykjavik), I think I'll give it a miss for now and stick to Google maps.

It probably thinks your holiday in Germany should include trips to Rome and the south of France.

Yeah agreed. I asked it about a place I wanted to go and not only did it get confused about where I meant (2 cities with the same name in different countries), it made places up.

I think that's great OP. It's been a game changer for me in so many ways. Will definitely use it for holiday planning. Agree with some posters above about how it can occasionally give incorrect info though, so worth looking up the restaurants and ruins to make sure they're real!!

I’ve just used this for cycle routes at my holiday destination- it’s good

it the app free?

So why wouldn't you just google in the first place? Genuine question. If you have to fact and sense check everything it tells you, what's the point of getting it involved?

I've just posted the OPs question but for a spa town in Spain that I've visited many times.

It describes a basic 3 star hotel that costs about £50 a night as the luxury option (it's fine but it's not luxury).

It suggests visiting a village an hour to the east of the town for 3 days, then visiting Granada, an hour to the west, returning to a village in walking distance from the first one, then going to the mountains north of Granada, followed by 3 days on the coast at a random place with nothing really going on, missing out on far more sensible choices.

It also suggests flying to an airport that has no direct flights from the UK. If I'd asked it to suggest some places scattered across Andalusia to randomly ping pong between it would have got it spot on, but it's not produced anything like a sensible holiday itinerary.

Using ChatGPT to plan a trip probably won’t do much better than rolling a dice over a map. It doesn’t know things, it just pastes together a selection of other info in plausible language.

Actually I used another AI tool, not ChatGPT but similar to sense check my heavily researched Vietnam itinerary.

What it came up with was quite similar - albeit it did try to pack too much in, and didn’t take account of weather patterns. But it did mention one or two ideas I hadn’t been aware of so was useful for that.

I suspect it does well for countries where there are already lots of itineraries available on the web (on Trailfinders and the like) as it just scrapes and collates these itineraries.

I’ve just asked ChatGPT for an itinerary of a trip I’ve just done. It came up with a fairly similar plan and some good hotel and restaurant recommendations. So I’ll maybe use it in future, but I still like doing it the old fashioned way - guidebooks and maps (and now supplemented with travel blogs).

This worked for me!!! I’m trying to find a truly dog friendly holiday cottage within a couple hours drive from me, with coastal walks and a fully enclosed secure garden. Obviously I’ll have to read the suggestions properly but the handful suggested were appropriate.

I think there are some fair comments here, certainly I would be double-checking info before making travel arrangements, but I would consider that just basic common sense. For me, it has been a really useful first look when I am considering a holiday in a region I am unfamiliar with. It is a great starting point in deciding whether I want to spend more time sifting through info to put a trip together, and the ability to interrogate it is so much easier than sifting through the bajillion websites, blogs and reviews out there. Personally, I'd much rather outsource that legwork to the AI.

If you find it useful, enjoy the shortcut and happy travels to you. If you don't, well just crack on with whatever does work for you, and also happy travels 🙂. Whatever your process is, I hope you end up somewhere you love.

Oh interesting... I kind of like the planning myself, but maybe will try asking it for our holiday in the Highlands this summer.