Airbnb CEO says it's still too early for AI trip planning

My mother works in a travel agency and she says it's nice asking chatgpt for suggestions, however she takes suggestions the same way that a seasoned programmer would with chatgpt code: as a baseline. Even if more people are visiting the same city, chances are the things they wanna see might be different, and chatgpt just says the most famous things to visit when prompted "give me a trip plan for <city>"

Last time I stayed in a property booked through Airbnb, their translation feature already changed the street name in key pickup location’s address on one French street to another French street (still in French), when translating from French. I’m paranoid enough to check the source language, but that could have been a huge trouble.<p>Staying there was a wonderful opportunity which probably hadn’t realised without Airbnb, or would have been unreachable to foreigners in some national holiday rental service, but it still is too early to generally ditch customer service and known processes. I have stayed around 90% of nights in hotels and hostels during my travels, the rest being Airbnb-style rentals, and I plan to keep it that way for a multitude of reasons.

AI works just fine for trip planning. I use it to scrape Airbnb apartments descriptions and reviews. Common problems such cockroaches or slow internet, are not usually mentioned directly, but with indirect special wording, and LLM can find those very well.<p>Also scraping newest social posts and Tiktok videos is great way to find cool stuff.

Why would anyone use an AI trip planner? If I go for a vacation, planning it and deciding what not to plan is a part of the joy of doing it.<p>Though a big problem at the moment is manipulation of online reviews and recommendations; and as far as I can tell AI is making that worse.

LLMs are stellar for trip planning. They can spit out a lot of potential options for a country or region.<p>I just add all the suggestions to a map and then plan way around them. Also doing some manual research like opening times.<p>Why I love this? I really don&#x27;t want to research too deep into my destinations as this kills a lot of the magic seeing seeing them in person.

I really hate traveling because of all the bureaucracy involved in checking-in, validating emails, validating whatsapp accounts, buying train tickets in foreign countries, doing all this on the small screen of my phone and while I&#x27;m sitting on some subway with dropping connections. Oh, and checking into the hotel takes 15 minutes because the clerk needs to make a copy of my passport which I&#x27;m questioning the legality of. There&#x27;s a LOT to be improved here.

Best AI assisted trip planner I use is wanderlog.com. They have the right balance of using LLMs for idea generation, match the data to opening times via Google and travel times between locations. Lots of other nice (non-AI) features too.

Last time I used ChatGPT to plan my trip it was a disaster. There’s something about the overly optimistic attitude that paints everything and everywhere as great, when the fact is, as a traveler, a lot of places are absolutely garbage or just too bizarre for words.<p>On ChatGPT’s advice, I ended up checked into a hotel on the grounds of a United Methodist Encampment, complete with check in&#x2F;out stations manned by angry boomers. Really didn’t see that one coming!

I agree with this take. I tried to use OpenAI Operator to find a hotel a few times recently and every time it has made enormous errors like booking for a month and 3 days instead of 3 days because the end date was selected from the next month instead of the current one in the date selector. Completely unusable.