Yes, I used GenAI to plan our vacation...how?

It's summer and that means many of us are taking some much-needed time to refresh!? Planning a family vacation can be a challenge and take a lot of time, so this year, I looked to AI to help me.? What were the highest impact uses?

To celebrate our eldest's high school graduation, we planned a longer than normal trip this year. It has been a dream for a decade, and we knew we wanted to see London and Paris - but what sights? How many could we fit in?? What are the best days for each thing?

1. Ideation - #TripAdvisor GenAI itinerary planning feature was pretty awesome to get us going. I then used #Copilot to prepare a top sights agenda based on Rick Steve's recommendations. I had Copilot put these in a table, then add open days and hours, add estimated visit lengths and estimated costs.? It did all of this in seconds.? I also asked it to indicate which ones were included in the respective "City Pass." Then copied into Excel, compared to Trip Advisors list, discussed with the family and prioritized based on interests. ?
2. Day trips: Now that we had the top in city sights narrowed down, we decided we should lock a couple days trips before filling in the 'in city' agenda.?? Even with major AI help, this was more challenging than I thought it would be. #Copilot helped with Loire Valley Chateau suggestions, including nice images, and timing requirements that enabled us to narrow it down a bit, but we still ended up doing a lot of manual work to nail train schedules and trying to find a local guide. Hoping next time there will be an AI Agent for much of this, especially train ticket booking which was a pain! ?
3. Markets: #Paris and #London are both known for amazing markets.? I used #ChatGPT to build a table that gave us descriptions, hours, and neighborhood so that we could decide if we could fit 1-2 in each city into neighborhood walks.? We loved Marché des Enfants Rouges, the oldest covered market in Paris, and Greenwich Market in London in particular.? Despite being highly recommended by humans and AI, Camden was not our thing as very gritty and crowded. ?
4. High impact prompt: "What is events are happening in x area on these dates?" We used this for Paris, Loire Valley and London and was a lifesaver for helping us avoid a massive parade in Paris (1M+ people) as well as a huge concert at one of the chateaus we wanted to see, while enabling us to catch part of an outdoor concert in London we would not have known about otherwise.? ?
5. Nity Gritty: We had a number of tactical issues along the way... Versailles website not working right to book fountain show, some restaurant menus only in French, etc. I found #ChatGPT was pretty good at helping with many of these in a more concrete way compared to search. ?
6. Packing List generation: we were trying to fit into carry-ons if we could to avoid fees and dealing with it on the Tube/Metro. #Copilot was handy for brainstorming recommendations for attire and then putting into a table in excel.? We refined by person slightly and had a shopping & packing list in minutes. With compression bags, we fit what we needed and ended up just doing laundry once!

I estimate Gen AI saved me dozens of hours of planning and significantly increased the quality of our trip by maximizing our adventure while minimizing mistakes.

Biggest Gaps:

1. Time spent on restaurant planning - we did a lot of comparison between Trip Advisor, Google, Michelin, Eater and The Fork because each had different features such as day of week availability vs ratings. Wish AI could aggregate based on our preferences as an agent.
2. Post trip - Now if we could just have #GenAI pull out the best images from the 10K+ we took and put it into a two 2 minute videos - one of food and one on sites, that would be amazing! ?

Hope you get some ideas from our experience on now to plan your travels with GenAI help!

John