Mostly middle higher class to higher class. There are exceptions of course, but regular Joe of people wanting to save money will plan a trip for themselves
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.
Same, especially because my crappy command of Italian, French and German (between A2 and B1) catches weird errors like this
Also scraping newest social posts and Tiktok videos is great way to find cool stuff.
AI is perfect to answer questions like:
- is there a big table on pictures (proper workspace)
- is there a direct sea view
- any mentions of drain issues...
You'll miss all the things you didn't ask about -- good and bad.
Reasonable ok ones are really expensive, overly expensive compared to going to a hotel, and affordable ones are all really crappy and so overly over expensive for their value.
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.
Because not everyone will enjoy what you do? It’s not some secret, I still know people who use travel agents for the same reason, others still who stick to cruising precisely because they dont want to think or plan, they just want to do.
Mystery solved.
I just add all the suggestions to a map and then plan way around them. Also doing some manual research like opening times.
Why I love this? I really don't want to research too deep into my destinations as this kills a lot of the magic seeing seeing them in person.
The gist is that the people who deeply research and plan, they create this perfect vision of the trip in their head. When you actually go on the trip, things can go wrong; weather is bad, destination was crowded, you got sick, etc. But years later, the perfect version of the trip and the actual version of the trip get mixed up in your memories. People who didn't plan, didn't have this "idealized" version imprinted.
I find this to be true so my spouse and I plan our trips meticulously and research everything.
We also capture a detailed log of our trips. And I think this combination really helps to highlight and reinforce the good memories while letting the not so good ones fade.
[0] https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-via...
One of my favorite trips involved planning as far as a train trip and booking a hostel. But beyond that my group basically blew off every plan we had and hung around the hostel because they had a really nice free pool table and really good cheap food and booze.
That is probably one of my top three trips of my life. I find my memories compressed because it was basically 5 days of Groundhog Day but it was a great time.
Making a daily log sounds miserable to me but then again I strongly dislike journaling.
Then again the phenomenon you bring up might contribute to what people love about Disney World so much. You have to do a lot of planning to get a lot out of it, and therefore you remember everything you did clearly because so much time was spent planning. I think I could tell you every restaurant I went to on my last trip since I had to fight for reservations and I was setting each day’s plan months ahead of time.
My wife and I were struggling with this doing it in Google Docs; it was absolutely a chore!
So I ended up creating a small (free) app to do this: https://turas.app
The Chrome extension[0] is particularly good (also free) because it lets you just do it all in Google Maps. I'd definitely recommend that you start with the extension if you're curious since it's really easy to use (the full web app is definitely more "power user" focused).
> Making a daily log sounds miserable to me but then again I strongly dislike journaling.
I'm in my 40's now and remember very little of the trips that I took in my early teens with my dad (who has now passed). Where did we go? What did we see? Where was this cool place that I only vaguely remember? Everything is kind of haze now. So the hope with these stories is that my kids can look back and really recall these adventures and places that they went. Not just in small snapshots in a social media feed, but as a singular , encapsulated story like this. If people ask how our trip was or they ask for tips and ideas, I just share these with them.
[0] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/turasapp/lpfijfdbgo...
If you're going to all the crowded tourist-y places, sure. It's a struggle to make them suggest anything off the beaten path for obvious reasons
Tripadvisor will have the same activities, but you have user reviews, pictures, you can book tickets, etc.
I even prefer reading Reddit travel reports or indexes of travel books for reading stuff on that website.
Or much more likely, to waste your time. DeepSeek recommended us to visit a place that was actually privately owned and couldn't be visited at all. Traditional methods (Google Maps, TripAdvisor, etc.) never would have.
> DeepSeek recommended us to visit a place that was actually privately owned and couldn't be visited at all.
One time some friends of mine got the wrong address for a party. When they showed up, a man was sitting on his porch with a shotgun, and he shot at their car multiple times while they hurriedly backed out of his driveway. A wrong address can be deadly, especially in unknown territory.
And please understand, I have personally created prototype agentic booking systems with route planning, concierge integrations and more. I am very excited about this space but also extremely cautious knowing exactly where cutting LLMs are and aren't useful enough not only for trusting your business logic with them, but trusting the safety of your customers.
Also, why are you doing it in the subway? To be fair, I once did vimtutor in a subway [1] and learned vim within two 30 min. rides but not the point :')
[1] Thanks to a HN'er like 8 years ago who was kind enough to mention it to me, I never heard of vimtutor and almost have never heard of it since (with 2 exceptions perhaps)
Its still okay to use, I just had to break the trip up into individual countries, but was hoping it wouldn't clog up so much.
On ChatGPT’s advice, I ended up checked into a hotel on the grounds of a United Methodist Encampment, complete with check in/out stations manned by angry boomers. Really didn’t see that one coming!