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Airbnb CEO says it's still too early for AI trip planning

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Re: Airbnb CEO says it's still too early for AI trip planning

#31

Post by mettamage »

amelius wrote: post #30
mettamage wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? I just use a laptop. I don't get it. Worst-case, I tether internet via my phone. 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)

The point is that all of this should be mostly automatic, and/or you should be able to do this before you even leave, and/or it should work in a unified way (the same with all airlines, train services, etc.)

Right, yea that's fair

Re: Airbnb CEO says it's still too early for AI trip planning

#32

Post by mettamage »

fabioborellini wrote: post #21

Last time I stayed in a property booked through Airbnb, their translation feature already changed the street name in key pickup location’s address on one French street to another French street (still in French), when translating from French. I’m paranoid enough to check the source language, but that could have been a huge trouble. Staying there was a wonderful opportunity which probably hadn’t realised without Airbnb…

> I’m paranoid enough to check the source language

Same, especially because my crappy command of Italian, French and German (between A2 and B1) catches weird errors like this

Re: Airbnb CEO says it's still too early for AI trip planning

#33

Post by well_actulily »

tomaytotomato wrote: post #5
nathancahill wrote: post #4

Best AI assisted trip planner I use is wanderlog.com. They have the right balance of using LLMs for idea generation, match the data to opening times via Google and travel times between locations. Lots of other nice (non-AI) features too.

Used it for a 120 day trip to Asia, but the UI got slow after adding more than 30 days of itinerary. 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.

We used it for a two week trip to Singapore and Japan last year, and yeah, I agree the app performance for packed trips is pretty rough.

Re: Airbnb CEO says it's still too early for AI trip planning

#34

Post by gurubavan »

amarcheschi wrote: post #3

My mother works in a travel agency and she says it's nice asking chatgpt for suggestions, however she takes suggestions the same way that a seasoned programmer would with chatgpt code: as a baseline. Even if more people are visiting the same city, chances are the things they wanna see might be different, and chatgpt just says the most famous things to visit when prompted "give me a trip plan for "

If you can say, what are her clientele like?

Re: Airbnb CEO says it's still too early for AI trip planning

#35

Post by kolinko »

chvid wrote: post #22

Why would anyone use an AI trip planner? If I go for a vacation, planning it and deciding what not to plan is a part of the joy of doing it. 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.

I like planning as well (although many people don’t), but I still miss a ton of stuff that chatgpt’s Deep Research can find.

Re: Airbnb CEO says it's still too early for AI trip planning

#36

Post by amarcheschi »

gurubavan wrote: post #34
amarcheschi wrote: post #3

My mother works in a travel agency and she says it's nice asking chatgpt for suggestions, however she takes suggestions the same way that a seasoned programmer would with chatgpt code: as a baseline. Even if more people are visiting the same city, chances are the things they wanna see might be different, and chatgpt just says the most famous things to visit when prompted "give me a trip plan for "

If you can say, what are her clientele like?

They do both business and individual trips in that agency. I guess she uses it the most for "citizen" trips and not for business trips, since on business trips they just have to manage the plane, pick ups (...)

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

Re: Airbnb CEO says it's still too early for AI trip planning

#37

Post by aimazon »

amelius wrote: post #27

I really hate traveling because of all the bureaucracy involved in checking-in, validating emails, validating whatsapp accounts, buying train tickets in foreign countries, doing all this on the small screen of my phone and while I'm sitting on some subway with dropping connections. Oh, and checking into the hotel takes 15 minutes because the clerk needs to make a copy of my passport which I'm questioning the legality…

Travel can be as easy as you want it to be if you are willing to spend money and/or plan. Stay at hotels that are part of a hotel group (e.g: Marriott) and check-in will be seamless. Use airport transfers and someone will be waiting at the airport with a sign and take you straight to the hotel (any reputable hotel will arrange it for you at a fair price). Use a global e-sim that you can activate when your plane lands. The pain you're describing is a choice (a completely reasonable choice to make for many people, but a choice nonetheless).

Re: Airbnb CEO says it's still too early for AI trip planning

#38

Post by ghxst »

chvid wrote: post #22

Why would anyone use an AI trip planner? If I go for a vacation, planning it and deciding what not to plan is a part of the joy of doing it. 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.

From my experience, there are tons of interesting places in my country that hardly get talked about online outside of my native language. You won’t really find them on the SEO-boosted travel blogs that google likes to return either. I feel like this is where AI could actually be useful.

Re: Airbnb CEO says it's still too early for AI trip planning

#39

Post by dangus »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #20
ElectRabbit wrote: post #2

LLMs are stellar for trip planning. They can spit out a lot of potential options for a country or region. 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 founder of Viator had an interesting take on this in an interview (How I Built This [0]). 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…

I think this if taken too far sounds a lot like work.

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.

Re: Airbnb CEO says it's still too early for AI trip planning

#40

Post by amelius »

aimazon wrote: post #37
amelius wrote: post #27

I really hate traveling because of all the bureaucracy involved in checking-in, validating emails, validating whatsapp accounts, buying train tickets in foreign countries, doing all this on the small screen of my phone and while I'm sitting on some subway with dropping connections. Oh, and checking into the hotel takes 15 minutes because the clerk needs to make a copy of my passport which I'm questioning the legality…

Travel can be as easy as you want it to be if you are willing to spend money and/or plan. Stay at hotels that are part of a hotel group (e.g: Marriott) and check-in will be seamless. Use airport transfers and someone will be waiting at the airport with a sign and take you straight to the hotel (any reputable hotel will arrange it for you at a fair price). Use a global e-sim that you can activate when your plane lands…

I guess next time I should ask my personal assistant to arrange it all for me.
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