Airbnb CEO says it's still too early for AI trip planning
28 points by smgit 4 months ago | 57 comments- amarcheschi 4 months agoMy 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 <city>"
- gurubavan 4 months agoIf you can say, what are her clientele like?
- amarcheschi 4 months agoThey 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
- amarcheschi 4 months ago
- gurubavan 4 months ago
- fabioborellini 4 months agoLast 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, 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.
- mettamage 4 months ago> 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
- mettamage 4 months ago
- throw098320923 4 months agoAI works just fine for trip planning. I use it to scrape Airbnb apartments descriptions and reviews. Common problems such cockroaches or slow internet, are not usually mentioned directly, but with indirect special wording, and LLM can find those very well.
Also scraping newest social posts and Tiktok videos is great way to find cool stuff.
- suddenlybananas 4 months agoI find it hard to see the advantage of scraping reviews versus just looking at the actual score.
- throw098320923 4 months agoScore is rigged, description does not match reality, negative reviews are deleted.
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...
- CharlieDigital 4 months agoOnly if you know what to ask.
You'll miss all the things you didn't ask about -- good and bad.
- CharlieDigital 4 months ago
- foldr 4 months agoI find that the only thing that works with Airnbnb is just to read all the reviews after excluding anything that isn't close to a 5.0 rating. Some kinds of negative comments in reviews can safely be ignored (e.g. the people who rented an apartment in the middle of downtown and were surprised that it's noisy), but almost any substantial negative comment in any review should be a red flag, no matter how many positive reviews there are.
- troupo 4 months agofor both Booking and AirBnB make sure to read recent reviews. Booking especially likes to default to "relevant" reviews (which are always glowing reviews from five years ago)
- troupo 4 months ago
- throw098320923 4 months ago
- greatgib 4 months agoIn my opinion, the issue when using Airbnb is not really to find the good one despite rigged scores, but more that there is usually no interesting offer at the good moment for interesting locations.
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.
- rainonmoon 4 months agoThis is very interesting, can you share a bit more about your methodology/setup?
- throw098320923 4 months agoAndroid app, USB dongle with HDMI capture card. Screenshot goes to OCR and LLM. There is a virtual USB HID mouse build on Arduino that clicks on links.
- nycdatasci 4 months agoFor more on this setup, see “Web Scraping Fundamentals” by Rube Goldberg.
- eudhxhdhsb32 4 months agoWouldn't it be easier to just interact directly with their web interface through an automated browser?
- nycdatasci 4 months ago
- throw098320923 4 months ago
- suddenlybananas 4 months ago
- chvid 4 months agoWhy 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.
- eloisius 4 months agoEverything should be a curated feed of slop. Even your travels.
- senko 4 months agoThis pretty much describes most of mainstream media and news pre-AI as well.
- senko 4 months ago
- ghxst 4 months agoFrom 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.
- akdev1l 4 months agoIf it’s not talked about much, it won’t be in the training dataset much
- ghxst 4 months agoFrom what I’ve seen, AI can do a solid job of bridging language gaps—though it depends on how it’s set up. The data exists, but it’s often buried in native-language sources. By focusing on local content, like newspapers and forum discussions you can shape a dataset that pulls in more authentic, region-specific data.
- ghxst 4 months ago
- cyberlurker 4 months agoBut… isn’t the AI going to parrot those travel blogs?
- ghxst 4 months agoThat's up to the engineers of said AI, if you goal is to have an AI that doesn't do that then you have multiple ways to achieve that goal.
- ghxst 4 months ago
- akdev1l 4 months ago
- theshackleford 4 months ago> Why would anyone use an AI trip planner?
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.
- kolinko 4 months agoI like planning as well (although many people don’t), but I still miss a ton of stuff that chatgpt’s Deep Research can find.
- deadbabe 4 months agoPlanning a trip is not at all fun unless you’re doing something very basic.
- jjj123 4 months agoI despise planning. I put it off until the last minute and usually have no plans as a result. I’m mostly okay with that, but could see AI planning filling that gap for me and would make it easier for me to schedule more complex trips across multiple countries.
- eloisius 4 months ago
- ElectRabbit 4 months agoLLMs 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.
- CharlieDigital 4 months agoThe 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 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...
- dangus 4 months agoI 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.
- CharlieDigital 4 months agoIt is work!
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).
This is one of those things that I think we regret later because it's always so hard to remember the details of those trips. So part of the goal of Turas was to make it easy to take a planned itinerary and make it into a "story". Here are a few examples: https://turas.app/s/japan-x-taiwan/BtEjycbA and https://turas.app/s/6-days-in-terceira-portugal/naAag5s3StTM... Basically, I made Turas so I could do the planning and then write the story using that same plan.> 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...
- stavros 4 months agoIt's great that you had a fun time hanging out with friends, but spending a few days with friends around a pool table and bar isn't really a trip, it's a gathering. Trips tend to be centered around the place you're going to, with experiences you can only have at that place, and nowhere else.
- CharlieDigital 4 months ago
- dangus 4 months ago
- troupo 4 months ago> They can spit out a lot of potential options for a country or region.
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
- ElectRabbit 4 months agoI tested it with several places I know very well from my "manually planed" tours. It was "aware" of them all. Even the more hidden recommendations.
- ElectRabbit 4 months ago
- iLoveOncall 4 months agoThat's just inferior to going on Tripadvisor and looking at the list of things to do.
Tripadvisor will have the same activities, but you have user reviews, pictures, you can book tickets, etc.
- ElectRabbit 4 months agoTA is IMHO far from useable when planing complex tours in a country.
I even prefer reading Reddit travel reports or indexes of travel books for reading stuff on that website.
- ElectRabbit 4 months ago
- soulofmischief 4 months agoPlenty of positives, but consider the negatives with current-generation language models. It takes one hallucination to put your life in danger.
- iLoveOncall 4 months ago> to put your life in danger
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.
- soulofmischief 4 months agoJust last week I was looking up how much of some chemical was required for toxic effects, and Google's AI response, sitting right at the top, gave me a number that was off by magnitudes. I ignored it and found a factual answer by corroborating multiple sources. That is the difference between life and death.
> 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.
- soulofmischief 4 months ago
- iLoveOncall 4 months ago
- CharlieDigital 4 months ago
- amelius 4 months agoI 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 of. There's a LOT to be improved here.
- aimazon 4 months agoTravel 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).
- amelius 4 months agoI guess next time I should ask my personal assistant to arrange it all for me.
- amelius 4 months ago
- mettamage 4 months agoWhat? 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)
- aimazon 4 months ago
- nathancahill 4 months agoBest 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.
- tomaytotomato 4 months agoUsed 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.
- well_actulily 4 months agoWe 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.
- well_actulily 4 months ago
- tomaytotomato 4 months ago
- iamleppert 4 months agoLast time I used ChatGPT to plan my trip it was a disaster. There’s something about the overly optimistic attitude that paints everything and everywhere as great, when the fact is, as a traveler, a lot of places are absolutely garbage or just too bizarre for words.
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!
- nycdatasci 4 months agoI agree with this take. I tried to use OpenAI Operator to find a hotel a few times recently and every time it has made enormous errors like booking for a month and 3 days instead of 3 days because the end date was selected from the next month instead of the current one in the date selector. Completely unusable.