Can an AI travel agent remove the stress of vacation booking? I tried three to find out

I hate booking vacations. For some, I'm sure it's an exciting process that's all part of the fun; for me, it's anything but. Endless hours of research, figuring out transit between activities and parsing through countless customer reviews sounds a bit too close than the day-to-day logistics of my job, so I'll take any opportunity to lighten the load.

Typically, that involves me going on a lot of guided tours and package holidays. But for my most recent vacation, I wanted to try something a little different – enter AI.

As part of our latest video series 'AI planned it', as you might guess, we allowed AI to decide everything from our destination to our itinerary; we even took AI on vacation with us in the form of three flagship phones; the iPhone 16 Pro, the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and the Google Pixel 9 Pro.

Watch the full episode below.

We booked our vacation itinerary using AI travel agents – here’s where it sent us - YouTube

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As part of our testing, we used three very different AI travel agents to help us book our activities.

First up was TripAdvisor, a known name in online travel booking with a sprawling database of customer travel reviews. Said data comes in pretty handy when it comes to TripAdvisor's AI assistant, providing the backbone of the service that uses OpenAI's generative AI technology to deliver customized itineraries for travelers.

Next up was Vacay, which also uses OpenAI's GPT models to deliver personalized itineraries; it doesn't seem as though they have trained the AI much with their own acquired data, but it's a fun free option that offers a broader range of formats and interfaces for planning your vacation compared to TripAdvisor.

Lastly, we used Layla.AI, the only paid option in our experiment. It's challenging to find what models underpin Layla, with data fed in from Skyscanner and Booking.com.

When it actually came to testing, the differences between these platforms became even more stark; and not just because Layla.AI ended up disappointing despite requiring a subscription to even try the platform. Of course, you'll have to watch the full video to find out why...

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