How We Used AI to Plan Smarter, Travel Better, and Save $3,000+

TL;DR: An experiment in hacking travel planning, that worked for us.

I used to be an obsessive DIY vacation planner.

Part of me still is.

Pouring over blogs, reels, vlogs to find an itinerary, hidden gems, off-beat diversions, a route and a plan that best suits our myriad interests.

I still believe that putting together the itinerary is one of the most exciting parts of travel, often more exciting with no-costs attached. And my years at India’s largest online travel agency (OTA) - MakeMyTrip, did train me well.

But times, they are a changin’!

Over the last 2 years I have increasingly come to rely on specialist, niche travel agents (especially as we venture into smaller, off-beat countries) to take care of majority of the parts, thus limiting our role to discussing, approving the itinerary that best suits our eclectic tastes. Plus, paying up!

East by NorthEast

A late thought, and sufficient nudges from my son pushed us towards planning a travel for Indo-China (Laos-Cambodia-Vietnam). This has been on our radar for sometime, given my interest in Buddhism and Zen Master Thich Nhat Hahn, especially exploring local cultures and my son, Arjyo’s interest in languages, socio-politics (specifically, the last century). And the fact that we both love food, coffee, nature and walking a lot.

Easy flight connections, and Visa-on-Arrival just made Vietnam even more attractive.

First stop: our usual go-to friendly travel agents, just a WhatsApp message away. They promised to get back “within 48 hours”. In the meantime, Arjyo had been looking up vlogs (I’m the blog type) and we spoke to a friend who was also planning to go. He had his trusted local agent as well.

And then we remembered chatGPT — just a tab away.

Enter ChatGPT

Our prompt: “Please make a day wise itinerary for a father and teen son, for Vietnam in December — 8/9 days. Both like history, walking around, culture, food and nature. Should not have too many flights and too many cities, not too much of running around and ticking off boxes…”

We added basic details like where we were traveling from, and a few more preferences.

Version 1 came in less than a minute.

The itinerary took the route most bloggers were recommending: start North in Hanoi and go down south to Ho Chi Minh City. Vietnam is a long slender country, “like a S” we heard many Vietnamese say. But this itinerary had very little time in Ho Chi Minh City (or Saigon). So we asked for more tweaks…

It gave 5 key changes (screenshot above shows just 2) and a departure via Da Nang airport, while giving us more days in Saigon. Da Nang was a new blip on our itinerary radar. At this time, we’re not acclimatised to Vietnamese names and getting things mixed up a lot. We need to pause and differentiate between Ha noi (or Hanoi) and Hoi An and Ha Long. Add Da Nang, Ninh Binh and many more to the mix.

In parallel, we were checking flights, and came back with a few shortlisted ones. Now we had the preferred arrival and departure times. And a question: what if we departed from Hanoi instead of Da Nang or Saigon? Version 3 emerged.

We cross checked flights. The reverse order lowered our flight costs by approximately 30% with exactly the same carrier and connections via the same airports, for the same set of dates. We eventually stuck to a 9 day itinerary, and costs were still much lower.

By Version 4 — the South to North route looked pretty neat: less cluttered, cleaner and calmer itinerary. Even if most bloggers/vloggers were suggesting the reverse N > S. Or maybe by now we could differentiate the Da Nangs from Hoi Ans, Ha Longs, and Ha Nois.

Version 5. More tweaks and we were ready in less than 90 minutes. With our range of preferences and requests either added or the irrelevant touristy bits deleted.

Questions about Visa followed. The info, links, data seemed to be all in order, ChatGPT wasn’t hallucinating.

Twist in the tale

While we were waiting for our friendly-neighbourhood-agents (a day hadn’t passed yet), another question popped up in our heads: who were the boutique travel agents of repute in Vietnam, for a tiny 2-people team like ours?

The six that it recommended were all real (non imagined), and slightly varied. Arjyo cross checked each of them on TripAdvisor, and figured out that 3 of these would work well.

They all catered to small, tiny groups, had good reviews and ratings, were local and understood the nuances of their country well. We also found that one of them actually had an impersonator—unsuspecting victims warned us on TripAdvisor to differentiate between the real deal and the impersonators (imperceptible changes in the website address and the physical location).

Next steps — we wrote to all of them.

Fastest Fingers First

Phi Cao, the CEO of Tonkin Travel won the fastest-fingers-first round. He was intrigued how we found them and doubly intrigued when the answer was ChatGPT. Weeks later we would meet up in his office in Hanoi, and explain the story to him and Nga, our amazing travel planner and guide. Tonkin Travel, Phi, Nga were as real as real can be (two of them seemed very human)—not imagined, hallucinated or artificial.

Long story short, when we compared all the itineraries and quotes, added up the international airfares—Tonkin came out tops. Not just because Ng and Phi listened, understood, suggested new ideas and alternatives, but also gave us a great smattering of wonderfully located 4 and 5 star hotels, transfers and internal flights while being over US$3000 cheaper. Tonkin also was the one that was being impersonated online, a good yardstick to judge potential goodness.

Stacks up on-ground?

On the ground, through our trip, it all stacked up too. Great friendly guides, timely pick-ups and drops, food tours, plus some thoughtful surprises like the Reaching Out Tea House in Hoi An.

So what does it mean for travel agents and online travel agents (OTAs) like the one I used to work for years ago? Would love to hear your thoughts and comments.

I’ll share my reflections — esp what it means for user journeys and user experiences, in the next post.