[ElectRabbit]

LLMs are stellar for trip planning. They can spit out a lot of potential options for a country or region.

I just add all the suggestions to a map and then plan way around them. Also doing some manual research like opening times.

Why I love this? I really don't want to research too deep into my destinations as this kills a lot of the magic seeing seeing them in person.

[CharlieDigital]

The founder of Viator had an interesting take on this in an interview (How I Built This [0]).

The gist is that the people who deeply research and plan, they create this perfect vision of the trip in their head. When you actually go on the trip, things can go wrong; weather is bad, destination was crowded, you got sick, etc. But years later, the perfect version of the trip and the actual version of the trip get mixed up in your memories. People who didn't plan, didn't have this "idealized" version imprinted.

I find this to be true so my spouse and I plan our trips meticulously and research everything.

We also capture a detailed log of our trips. And I think this combination really helps to highlight and reinforce the good memories while letting the not so good ones fade.

[0] https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-via...

[dangus]

I think this if taken too far sounds a lot like work.

One of my favorite trips involved planning as far as a train trip and booking a hostel. But beyond that my group basically blew off every plan we had and hung around the hostel because they had a really nice free pool table and really good cheap food and booze.

That is probably one of my top three trips of my life. I find my memories compressed because it was basically 5 days of Groundhog Day but it was a great time.

Making a daily log sounds miserable to me but then again I strongly dislike journaling.

Then again the phenomenon you bring up might contribute to what people love about Disney World so much. You have to do a lot of planning to get a lot out of it, and therefore you remember everything you did clearly because so much time was spent planning. I think I could tell you every restaurant I went to on my last trip since I had to fight for reservations and I was setting each day’s plan months ahead of time.

[CharlieDigital]

It is work!

My wife and I were struggling with this doing it in Google Docs; it was absolutely a chore!

So I ended up creating a small (free) app to do this: https://turas.app

The Chrome extension[0] is particularly good (also free) because it lets you just do it all in Google Maps. I'd definitely recommend that you start with the extension if you're curious since it's really easy to use (the full web app is definitely more "power user" focused).

    > Making a daily log sounds miserable to me but then again I strongly dislike journaling.

This is one of those things that I think we regret later because it's always so hard to remember the details of those trips. So part of the goal of Turas was to make it easy to take a planned itinerary and make it into a "story". Here are a few examples: https://turas.app/s/japan-x-taiwan/BtEjycbA and https://turas.app/s/6-days-in-terceira-portugal/naAag5s3StTM... Basically, I made Turas so I could do the planning and then write the story using that same plan.

I'm in my 40's now and remember very little of the trips that I took in my early teens with my dad (who has now passed). Where did we go? What did we see? Where was this cool place that I only vaguely remember? Everything is kind of haze now. So the hope with these stories is that my kids can look back and really recall these adventures and places that they went. Not just in small snapshots in a social media feed, but as a singular , encapsulated story like this. If people ask how our trip was or they ask for tips and ideas, I just share these with them.

[0] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/turasapp/lpfijfdbgo...

[stavros]

It's great that you had a fun time hanging out with friends, but spending a few days with friends around a pool table and bar isn't really a trip, it's a gathering. Trips tend to be centered around the place you're going to, with experiences you can only have at that place, and nowhere else.

[CharlieDigital]

    > Trips tend to be centered around the place you're going to, with experiences you can only have at that place, and nowhere else.

I think this is a great delineation.

For me, because I'm traveling as a family of 4, the cost of any trip is significant. We did a Japan/Taiwan trip this past winter and the total cost with flights was probably in the $12-14k range. At this level of expense, I'm going to plan as many of the high level details as possible to really maximize that experience and reduce headaches in the moment of travel.

[dangus]

On the other hand a lot of people who book expensive trips to places like beach destinations, resorts, and cruises want to escape the daily grind of planning out and organizing their daily life. They want to just show up and relax and that is completely valid.

Also, I find that a lot of times planned activities ahead of time look a lot different than what you find when you get somewhere.

[CharlieDigital]

You do the planning beforehand so that you can minimize the thinking while there :)

[dangus]

Are you gatekeeping my definition of a trip?

It was definitely a trip. We spent three days on a train and saw scenery. We saw some local sights but were relaxed about it and yes we spent a lot of time chilling in the hostel.

We couldn’t have had that experience elsewhere.

We also met other travelers.

[troupo]

> They can spit out a lot of potential options for a country or region.

If you're going to all the crowded tourist-y places, sure. It's a struggle to make them suggest anything off the beaten path for obvious reasons

[ElectRabbit]

I tested it with several places I know very well from my "manually planed" tours. It was "aware" of them all. Even the more hidden recommendations.

[iLoveOncall]

That's just inferior to going on Tripadvisor and looking at the list of things to do.

Tripadvisor will have the same activities, but you have user reviews, pictures, you can book tickets, etc.

[ElectRabbit]

TA is IMHO far from useable when planing complex tours in a country.

I even prefer reading Reddit travel reports or indexes of travel books for reading stuff on that website.

[soulofmischief]

Plenty of positives, but consider the negatives with current-generation language models. It takes one hallucination to put your life in danger.

[iLoveOncall]

> to put your life in danger

Or much more likely, to waste your time. DeepSeek recommended us to visit a place that was actually privately owned and couldn't be visited at all. Traditional methods (Google Maps, TripAdvisor, etc.) never would have.

[soulofmischief]

Just last week I was looking up how much of some chemical was required for toxic effects, and Google's AI response, sitting right at the top, gave me a number that was off by magnitudes. I ignored it and found a factual answer by corroborating multiple sources. That is the difference between life and death.

> DeepSeek recommended us to visit a place that was actually privately owned and couldn't be visited at all.

One time some friends of mine got the wrong address for a party. When they showed up, a man was sitting on his porch with a shotgun, and he shot at their car multiple times while they hurriedly backed out of his driveway. A wrong address can be deadly, especially in unknown territory.

And please understand, I have personally created prototype agentic booking systems with route planning, concierge integrations and more. I am very excited about this space but also extremely cautious knowing exactly where cutting LLMs are and aren't useful enough not only for trusting your business logic with them, but trusting the safety of your customers.