When you’re planning a vacation you might know where you want to go, but you need help with what to do when you get there. Where to stay, where to eat, what to do during the day, and are there any baseball games/live bands/festivals taking place when we’re going to be there?
People have been using Chat GPT to create travel plans and itineraries but Google believes it can do it better. And maybe it can because of the billions of pages of information in its search engine. At least I was anxious to see what it could do.
Now, to plan a vacation all you need to do is ask Google and its new generative AI tool in the normal Google Search bar. Let’s plan a vacation in San Francisco, California. We’ll add that we are interested in live music and wine and would like to include Napa Valley.
Add the dates and for how many people. I type into the search bar “plan a vacation in San Francisco for June 18th to 28th for 4 people. We are interested in live music and wine.”
After hitting ‘enter’, Google scans its resources and in a few seconds, gives us a daily itinerary. Something for the morning, afternoon, and evening that it thinks we’ll like based on our search criteria.
It recommends Bix restaurant with live music on day one. I can read reviews, see it on a map, visit the website, and see the menu.
AI recommends we spend the first few days in San Francisco, and then take the remaining days to travel to popular winery’s in Napa Valley. Not only does it deliver recommendations of which winery’s have the best tours but it includes driving directions and even some cool places to stop along the way.
It also shows available flights and hotel recommendations where I can search for ‘deals’ and vacation rentals.
I tried it again to plan a trip to Chicago in June and told Google I love baseball.
Once again, it returned a 5-day itinerary for those dates and made sure to include a game at Wrigley Field. A link on that recommendation took me to the box office for tickets.
I found the links to Reddit communities to be most helpful. Rather than searching the millions of sub Reddits to find one with reviews and recommendations, Google sent me links to the best ones.
And it’s all in one search. Since it’s generative AI and like you’re talking to a real person, you can ask follow up questions rather than starting over.
If you’re happy with what Google’s AI assistant found you can share it with someone else by exporting it to Gmail and sending it off. They’ll get the itinerary in their inbox with clickable links. Or you can export the trip to a Google Doc to print or share.
Google’s Generative AI for things like this is still experimental but I found it to be extremely helpful in planning a vacation. It is just part of Google’s new AI platform called “Gemini”.
