Booking.com’s AI Trip Planner: Your AI Travel Agent
The excitement of travel begins long before you board the plane—it starts with the planning phase. Exploring destinations, comparing prices, crafting itineraries, and getting personalized recommendations are all part of the fun, and now, artificial intelligence is making the process easier and faster. Booking.com’s AI Trip Planner, as seen in the Super Bowl ad featuring The Muppets, aims to be a travel agent at your fingertips. It leverages a combination of Booking.com’s existing machine-learning models (such as GenAI Orchestrator) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT API. Launched in June 2023, with various updates since, the planner has evolved from answering general questions to providing specific, personalized advice.
Think of the AI trip planner as a tool to help you make those big decisions. It can suggest restaurants, hotels, and even itineraries.
The AI Trip Planner is free to use and is available via the Booking.com mobile app. Here’s a guide to using it.
Your AI Copilot: A Step-by-Step Guide
If you use Booking.com regularly, sign into your account on the app, so that the AI Trip Planner can access your past searches and travel history. Here’s how to get started:
- Open the App: Launch the Booking.com mobile application.
- Navigate to Search: Click on ‘Search’ located in the bottom navigation bar.
- Find the AI Trip Planner: Look for the option labeled ‘Chat with our AI Trip Planner’ and click ‘Try it out.’ This will activate the chatbot.
You can use the AI travel agent to either get ideas for a future trip or to assist with planning a trip you have already started. This chatbot prompts you for your preferences, needs, and budget much like a human travel agent would. However, it’s important to remember that the Booking.com AI Trip Planner is still in beta phase, meaning it could be prone to errors. View these tools as aids to support your research, not your sole source of information—at least until they become more sophisticated. For now, it’s best to cross-reference the AI’s suggestions with your own independent research.
Testing the AI Trip Planner: A Summer in Paris and a Winter Ski Trip
To get started, you can use the AI to get inspiration for a trip, or to help with the planning of an existing trip. I started with several prompts.
Planning a trip to Paris:
I asked the AI these questions:
“I want to take a trip to Paris to do people-watching and eat good food and drink coffee. I want to stay off of the beaten track, if possible. I need flights from Newark and want a hotel around $150 per night.”
The AI’s response included information and hotel suggestions. I added some specifics about accommodation, requesting boutique hotels with a minimum of an 8-star rating. Initially, the results included a luxury hotel option priced at $1,817 per night. While I would love that option, it’s not within budget. I appreciated that the tool suggested alternatives, some of which were in my nightly budget or had many high ratings. Having the ability to click on prospective hotels to view photos and location information saved a ton of time in the research phase. Once a hotel is selected, you can ask property-specific questions by clicking on the Ask a Question button in each card. The property-specific questions feature is an impressive aspect of the tool, enabling a very granular search.
Planning a Winter Ski Trip:
You can also use the AI Trip Planner to come up with ideas for destinations. For example, asking, “What are some good winter destinations in the US to go skiing for a week?”
The resulting options were Killington, Park City, and Vail. I asked follow-up questions, like “Where is Killington?” The AI also explained why the destinations were suitable for ski trips, listing family-friendly activities, cultural experiences, ski terrain, and downtown areas.
The AI Trip Planner’s ability to leverage the platform’s many years of ratings and reviews informs its efficient results, making it a useful tool in travel planning.
