A travel expert used ChatGPT to plan her entire European backpacking trip. Madison Rolley, 24, regularly posts tips on her TikTok for finding the cheapest flights and hotels.
But keen to try something different, she asked AI tool ChatGPT to plan her two-week trip to Europe, setting the bot a budget of £800 per person. The digital nomad coach asked the software to plan her a two-week trip to Europe, visiting between four cities which included travel and accommodation.
Madison from Nashville, Tennessee, US, also asked for three activities in each location, and tasked the tech with including those costs - and food - within the budget. It laid out the perfect plan - setting out a route using planes and trains.
The software originally recommended Stockholm, Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona and Copenhagen -but the digital nomad tailored her trip and is now visiting Stockholm, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam To keep them entertained, Chat GPT recommended they visit the Anne frank museum, the Van Gough museum and take a canal cruise in Amsterdam.
Then the technology suggested the Lourve and Eiffel Tower for their time in Paris. Madison and her friend have booked their trip and will leave on July 3 this year.
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For the trip for two people, ChatGPT allocated $1,300 for 13 nights accommodation, $300 for 12 attractions and $500 for travel, coming in at $2,100 for the trip between two - not including a flight home. Madison said planning this trip would have taken her days - but the software did it in minutes.
The most impressive part of the software was that it gave Madison "inspiration" and that it could "easily be tweaked further to show free attractions or unusual ones". She said: "it was brilliant for sorting it out logistically and setting it in a timeline that was easy to follow.
“I was trying to figure out what the perfect itinerary would be to visit multiple places in a way that made sense and flowed well and also be able to budget it out. I wanted some inspiration, and I’ve been obsessed with ChatGPT from a marketing standpoint.
"I do marketing on the site as well. And also just in life, I just feel like it's such a hack for everything. I was on ChatGPT and I was like ‘Oh, you know what? I should see what it will spit out because people have been testing this for the most crazy things.
“One of the things it came with was, in Amsterdam, it was like ‘go on a canal cruise’ I would have never really thought to do that. The way the ChatGPT laid it out for me, I went from Stockholm to Paris and then to Brussels and then to Amsterdam, which you can all do by train.
“It very much laid out a path that made sense to travel and it also showed how you would go about booking everything, which I thought was really cool. It was like, okay, you're going to go by plane here and then you're going to take a train here and that's roughly how much it's going to cost, which was really neat.”
For Madison’s trip, she set the budget for $1000, but said the tool could be used for whatever budget or preferences. “You can really give it all the information if you want about what your preferences are, and then you can ask the prompt of ‘Now build me an itinerary based on what my preferences are’” she said.
“It is limited. At the end of the day, it's not going to know you.
“You're the only person that can know what you'll like and what you won't like, but it can at least give some very solid inspiration for planning your next trip and maybe helping you with generalising a budget.” Madison said she would recommend using the tool if you’re planning a holiday, especially if you’re looking to do it on a budget.
She said: “It's giving a general guide - it's giving you that inspiration. You can get a little bit of an understanding of what the price is going to look like from country to country or that flight is going to look like.
“Then you can go from there and actually book things and do your research and build out your budget." Madison started travelling as a student and has since been to Europe, North and South America and other countries around the world, on a budget.
She uses airline notification services and online sites that fill vacant hotel rooms to travel on the cheap, and shares her best hacks with her viewers and clients online. “It’s really just trying to help people travel more without breaking the bank. That's my sole mission,” Madison said.
ChatGPT is an online tool that allows you to have human-like conversations with an AI system, and can be used for things like answering complex questions, translating sentences into different languages or even writing out whole essays.
