Planning Budget Itineraries with ChatGPT: Our Thoughts

Hey, Guys! So we only had two days in Paris (including getting some admin stuff done), so we needed a quick way to establish an itinerary without taking up too much of our travel time. There was a viral reel a while back talking about how to use ChatGPT to generate a travel itinerary, so we decided to give it ago. Here's how it went.

We asked it to give us an itinerary for Paris that started at 8h and ended at 22h at our hostel (sunset wasn't until 22h every night!), to budget 50 USD per day, avoid major tourist attractions (we checked off most of the "Oos" and "Ahs" the first afternoon), and rely on local restaurants and public transportation. We also asked it to give us things to do in different neighbourhoods.

Its first SWAG (Sophisticated Wild A** Guess) wasn't too bad. We noticed that ChatGPT didn't initially give specific restaurants, so we had to add that to our next list of instructions. It also didn't tell us how far we would be walking, and it wanted us to do A LOT of walking, so we added that in, too. Finally, we asked it to list the estimated cost for each activity so it would be easier for us to check the budget. After several attempts back and forth (about 20 minutes of work), we had a more than decent itinerary. ChatGPT gave us some good restaurant recommendations, cool neighbourhoods to see, a great park, and really helped us plan our subway stops. So, on the whole, a pretty successful endeavour.

On the frustrating side, though, Jo has heard me say this several times: for something so smart, ChatGPT sure is dumb. It's kind of like that one coworker you have that does EXACTLY as they're told and nothing more. "Take out the trash...tie up the bag...take it outside...put it in the bin...close the lid on the bin...come back inside...get back to work..." It didn't do logical things, like update the subway stations when we asked it to update the itineraries. We caught on (admittedly not for several hours), and learned to add "update the subway stops as necessary" to our follow-on instructions.

ChatGPT also did not really understand menu prices or offerings. It regularly referred us to restaurants for 10-15 USD meals, but they mostly ended up in the 20 EU range (and sometimes upwards of 50 USD). We learned to check the menus online whenever possible to make sure they were in our budget and that they actually served the food we wanted, and, if not, we would look for local restaurants on Google Maps that were and did.

We noticed that when planning on a budget, ChatGPT likes you to walk districts and neighbourhoods to save money. A LOT. There are plenty of free activities about, and after the first couple of days trying it out, we added something like "replace the [insert neighbourhood here] with a free activity]," and it worked out pretty good for us.

All in all, we give using ChatGPT for budget travel a solid B (Jo says "with good training, it could be an A-, but that could just be operator error" (it's me; I'm the operator)). It really took a lot of the initial research out of the equation and saved us a lot of time, but we also learned that at the end of the day it is just a computer program, and we have to double check its work. We'll definitely keep using it on this trip, but we're also going to be sure to keep an open mind to things it may have overlooked.

If you're interested in using ChatGPT, we would definitely say to give it a trip, because it very well might work out for you, especially if you're not on a strict budget. If you want to know some of the things we started doing with it, please hit us up on Instagram or Snapchat! Both are linked at the bottom of the page!