When Vladislav Guzey planned a trip to Taiwan, he turned to AI — not just for itinerary planning, but for visa advice and more.
He had no reason to doubt it — he used AI all the time.
So when AI told him that Russian passport holders didn’t need a visa to enter the country, he believed his bot.
Until he turned up at the airport and had to turn back around.
“I relied on that information,” Guzey told The Post.
The AI summary, he later realized, provided outdated search results — turning stale information into a confident answer with real consequences.
And he’s hardly alone.
AI knows our darkest secrets. Our personal health data. The embarrassing questions we should know the answer to. So, it’s inevitable that travelers would outsource the tedious act of itinerary planning to chatbots.
But many are discovering that their confident answers aren’t necessarily correct.
An alarming number, 43%, of AI-generated itineraries contained at least one verifiable problem, according to a recent study, and almost three-quarters of U.S. travelers (74%) have reportedly turned to AI during the planning stage of a trip, seeking hotel recommendations, what to do, and where to shop. Half of travelers even use it while traveling for weather and flight updates.
But as more travelers turn to AI to map out vacations, travel advisors told The Post that outright mistakes are only part of the problem. It can struggle with personal preferences, pacing, and details that turn a list of recommendations into a truly memorable travel experience.
ChatGPT can produce an itinerary in seconds, but it often lacks any individuality.
That’s helping drive travelers back toward something a chatbot still can’t replicate: human judgment and consideration — a lesson Robyn Levin learned the hard way.
Levin thought she had found exactly what she was looking for when planning a complicated European vacation: a newly renovated hotel on the Baltic coast that ChatGPT assured her had been updated in 2024.
Great spa. Beautiful views. Exactly what she had asked for when planning her trip.
Except the hotel hadn’t been renovated since 2008.
“Chat apologized, as it frequently does, and said, ‘I should have been more careful with the research,’” Levin told The Post.
The six-continent traveler and luxury travel author had turned to AI for help planning, because why not? Everyone else is.
ChatGPT suggested a hotel that hadn’t been renovated and a travel route that didn’t exist.
Optimistic, Levin tried again and asked for a luxury Lake Como hotel near a train station. ChatGPT enthusiastically recommended one it said was just a two-minute walk away.
A minor hitch — there was no train station. To reach the hotel, Levin would actually need to take a ferry across the lake.
Andrew Hickey was on a trip in Italy and turned to ChatGPT to find a good restaurant near his hotel and confirm it was open.
“I walked over to find out that they are closed on Mondays. Not just this particular Monday, but they have always been closed on Mondays,” the 46-year-old traveler from New Jersey told The Post. “When I went back to AI to tell them that this is inaccurate information, they replied, ‘my bad 😂.”
And while planning a trip near Banff, Hadis Hesabi — the co-founder and CTO of an AI trip-planning startup — ironically used AI and was recommended a scenic waterfall that sounded convincing enough to visit.
Hesabi told The Post the description had enough detail to seem plausible.
“We only caught it when we tried to verify the location before going,” she said, noting that the experience became a guide for how she built her own company.
“Rather than letting the language model invent geography, we built a knowledge graph of real places and geographic relationships for our planner, Xavier, to reason over,” Hesabi said, cautioning that you should always verify your itinerary against a map or authoritative source before you go.
Travel advisors told The Post that botched itineraries are just one part of the problem. Even when AI gets the facts right, it can still suggest a trip with basic options, tourist traps, or even a long line.
But some travel agencies can cost thousands of dollars annually in memberships, while others take a commission on the trip they plan. AI, meanwhile, can spit out an itinerary for free — an obvious draw for travelers who don’t want to pay a professional planner.
But you know what they say, cheap is cheap.
Amy Norman, founder and CEO of bespoke travel agency Nellie, said one client brought her an AI-generated Tokyo itinerary filled with legitimate suggestions — Shibuya, Meiji Shrine and other familiar landmarks.
“It was the equivalent of telling a first-time visitor to New York to see Times Square and Central Park,” Norman told The Post. “Our clients are looking for the opposite: access, originality and a trip that feels deeply personal.”
When one Nellie client traveled to London with young children obsessed with Harry Potter, Norman’s team didn’t stop at booking the obvious studio tour. They arranged for actors to arrive in costume and in character, then led the family around London to locations connected to the films—turning the entire day into part of the fantasy.
A human planner is also considering things an itinerary generator can easily miss, the luxury travel planner said. Things like how much time a family wants to spend sightseeing, how long it really takes to get from place to place, eating habits, and whether they like to sleep in.
“Our business is growing rapidly because travelers are looking for something AI cannot really deliver: trips built around immersive cultural experiences you cannot simply find online,” Norman said.
That kind of curation is especially valuable at the high end of the market, where travelers are increasingly willing to spend more for experiences that feel distinctive and deeply personal.
One recent analysis found that 81% of wealthy North American travelers valued unique and immersive accommodations over standardized luxury hotel chains. A 2026 survey of more than 500 U.S. luxury travelers found 79% planned to increase their travel spending this year and nearly a quarter expected to spend “much more.”
Stacy Fischer Rosenthal, president of luxury travel firm Fischer Unlimited, said her clients are paying for exactly that: a dedicated team that knows their preferences, works with personally vetted partners worldwide, and can anticipate problems before they happen.
“We actually have relatively few examples of clients using AI-generated itineraries, largely because our clients come to Fischer Unlimited specifically for our expertise and highly personalized service,” the veteran travel executive told The Post.
Fischer clients pay an annual fee of $150K for dedicated services and bespoke experiences AI can’t replicate.
She recently had a client planning a trip to Spain who questioned the need for a private guide and used ChatGPT to create his own day-by-day itinerary instead; he shared it with his team.
“When we looked through it, we found several issues, including restaurants that had long since closed and exhibitions that would not be open during his stay,” Rosenthal said. “AI can certainly be useful,” Rosenthal said, but it cannot replace “personal knowledge, trusted relationships, judgment and accountability.”
Other advisors say the mistakes can become far more expensive. Rob DelliBovi, owner and CEO of RDB Hospitality Group, told The Post that a client relied on AI for instructions on claiming a tax refund at Milan’s airport.
“We had a client lose enormous tax money because AI told them the tax refund stop at Milan airport was after security — when they crossed security, they learned that it was before security, and they weren’t allowed to go back,” DelliBovi told The Post. “They lost thousands.”
DelliBovi said his team has also seen clients arrive with AI suggestions for tours that do not exist, impractical flight routings, and three-star hotels described as five-star experiences.
“We’re looking forward to AI getting better and better; it’s simply not there yet,” DelliBovi said. “I think travelers understand that AI is often wrong from their own experience, and that causes them to go to the experts.”
That doesn’t doesn’t mean the technology is useless today, said luxury travel advisor Julie Middlebrook-Levin.
She likes it when her clients show up with AI-generated itineraries — because it often shows where their attention is focused. She then fact-checks the recommendations, fixes the logistics, and rebuilds the trip around the person taking it.
“People can get an itinerary in seconds now,” the pro told The Post. “What they’re realizing is that getting an itinerary and getting a great trip are two very different things.”
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