Who Plans Your Holiday Now?

A recent report found that 81% of travellers in Vietnam say they would use AI to plan their trips, the highest rate in Asia. It’s a relatively small statistic, but it points to something bigger. Travel is becoming one of the most practical and everyday uses of AI.

In practice, it’s starting to replace a familiar process.

Instead of opening multiple tabs, comparing flights, reading reviews, watching videos, and gradually piecing together an itinerary, people are beginning to ask a single question. Something like: plan a five-day trip to Barcelona with good food, affordable flights, and things to do with a toddler.

The appeal is obvious. It’s faster, more convenient, and feels personalised. You get a structured plan in seconds rather than building one gradually yourself.

That shift is already being reflected in products. Google has begun introducing more conversational trip planning into its tools. Features such as “Ask Maps” allow people to request personalised recommendations and itineraries in a chat-style format, rather than relying entirely on searches, filters, and reviews.

But there’s also an emerging question around what this does to travel itself.

Some researchers are starting to describe the rise of “algorithm-shaped itineraries”. If large numbers of people begin asking similar questions, they may also begin receiving similar answers. The same cafés, viewpoints, neighbourhoods, and routes surface repeatedly, not necessarily because they are the only options, but because they are the most visible, most reviewed, or easiest for systems to recommend confidently.

In that sense, AI doesn’t just help people plan trips. It can start influencing where people go, what they prioritise, and how places are experienced.

It’s still early, and for many people this is simply a more efficient way to organise travel. But if AI becomes the default starting point, it introduces a subtle shift. Instead of discovering a place through a mix of recommendations, research, spontaneity, and wrong turns, more of that process becomes condensed into a single interaction.

And that leads to a slightly different question. If AI is planning the trip, how much of the experience is still discovery?