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As of 12 August 2026, AI can only partly plan your holiday itinerary.
Most people should hand this to a purpose-built tool.
Can you do it?
5 minutesto a draft.
1 hourto something you’d act on.
Cost, all in£0
Skill needednone
Who has to check ityou
What the alternative costsA travel agent commonly charges £50 to £150 to build a bespoke itinerary, or takes commission inside the package price.
If this goes wrong: you discover on the pavement that the museum shut last year, and the day that was planned around it unravels with deposits already paid.
What to actually do
Use a tool built for this
The route this page recommends
Purpose-built software does the mechanical share of this.
Wanderlog
Free
A free itinerary app with maps, live place data and collaborative editing: the structure of the AI plan with the facts attached to reality, which is exactly what a chat cannot promise.
Do it yourself
Second choiceA chat interface, no skill needed, and roughly 1 hour until you can act on the result.
Prompt
Plan four days in Lisbon in October for two adults on a mid-range budget. Structure each day as morning, afternoon and evening with realistic walking or transit between stops. For every venue, restaurant and price you mention, mark it needs checking, and end with the single list of everything I must verify before booking: opening days, prices, closures, and whether each place still exists. Do not present any detail as current.
Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.
Hand it to a person
The distant thirdA person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.
What it gets wrong
- Opening hours, prices and even the existence of venues come from training data and are presented as current; the itinerary reads authoritative precisely where it is stale.
- It invents plausible specifics, a restaurant name, a tram number, a ticket price, and the invented ones are indistinguishable from the remembered ones.
- It packs days to the itinerary's logic rather than to a holiday's: no queue time, no rain, no afternoon where you simply stay longer because it is good.
What caps this at PARTLY: real time truth and taste.
How we scored this
Five axes, each scored nought to two by hand: ten means AI carries the task cleanly, and the thresholds that turn a total into YES, PARTLY or NO are published in the methodology. Each axis name links to its definition.
| Axis | Score (0–2) |
|---|---|
| Output | 1 |
| Inputs | 1 |
| Verification | 1 |
| Liability | 1 |
| Effort delta | 2 |
| Total | 6 / 10 |
The methodology and its thresholds are published in full.
FAQ
- Can AI plan my holiday itinerary?
- Partly. The answer here is PARTLY. The structure it produces, days, routes, pacing, sequencing by neighbourhood, is genuinely good and saves hours. The specifics are not to be trusted: hours, prices and closures are stale or invented, so every bookable fact needs checking before money moves.
- Why does ChatGPT recommend closed restaurants?
- Because it answers from training data, not from the live world. A venue that closed after the data was gathered is still open as far as the model knows, and it will present it with full confidence. Treat every specific as a lead to verify, never as a fact to book.
- What is AI actually good at in travel planning?
- The thinking you would do with a guidebook and an evening: which neighbourhoods group well, sensible day shapes, pacing for weather or for kids, what to skip. Ask for the reasoning and the shortlist, keep the fact-checking and the booking for yourself.
- Should I book anything an AI recommends?
- Not directly. Verify the place exists and its current hours and prices on its own site, and check the entry rules for the country on GOV.UK's foreign travel advice. The five minutes of checking per booking is the whole difference between a plan and a story.
Nearby answers
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