AI Travel Apps: How GuideGeek is Revolutionizing Holiday Planning

Traveling is fun. Plannning travel… not so much. It can be a tedious task to find the right hotels, restaurants, and sights to see, and it gets even more complicated when there are certain conditions that need to be met. But AI might be able to make that easier.

Google recently announced new AI features coming to Maps that could help you plan a trip, and the timing on that couldn’t be better since a survey from Matador Networks points to the likelihood that about 30 percent of people expect to use AI when planning their holiday trips this year.

According to the press release detailing the findings, more than 1,000 travelers were polled. In the results, Millennials and Gen Z are the most likely to use AI (about half of them plan to), while Gen X and Baby Boomers are less likely. Equally as important, people planning trips with families are more likely to use AI, as are people with disabilities.

“The holiday season often finds people making plans with family members and friends they don’t necessarily get to see at other times of year,” says Matador Network CEO Ross Borden. “Generative AI is really well suited to finding activities for a diverse group of people with different interests. You can ask GuideGeek specific questions like, ‘We have a 94-year-old who uses a wheelchair and a 15-year-old vegetarian in our group. What are some good options for dinner in Chicago?'”

GuideGeek is a free AI chatbot built on OpenAI that can provide instant responses to travel-related questions. For example, you can ask it to help you plan travel, which includes details about places to stay, places to eat, sights to see, and more.

You can access GuideGeek through WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. It’s just a chat. When I asked for recommendations for a three-day road trip to a mountainous area near where I live, it gave me some good recommendations. Then, I followed up on the itinerary with questions about hotels and restaurants, and it returned suggestions for those as well. In total, using GuideGeek I was able to plan a complete trip (minus the time it takes to actually make reservations) in about 20 minutes.

The information, according to GuideGeek’s website, is sourced from human travel experts in the Matador network.

The takeaway here is that regardless of which age group you fall into, AI has the potential to reduce the amount of time it takes you to plan a trip. AI tools like GuideGeek can help you figure out where you want to go, where to stay when you get there, and what to do while you’re in a given area. In other words, it makes the whole process of planning a trip a lot less tedious.