How to Use AI to Plan a Trip: Better Prompts for Travel Recommendations

If artificial intelligence can quickly find needles in legal haystacks, crack long-unsolved math problems and create retro 1980s images convincing enough to be Bon Jovi album covers, why is it so bad at planning a week in Rome?Blame it on the prompts.Chatbots may still be a long way from replacing old-school travel planning techniques, but they can create far better results than most of us realize.

The problem: We’re not helping them enough.“They’re not oracles,” said Ethan Mollick, a professor who studies A.I.and its impact at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

“Think of it like working with a smart person.”Using advice from Dr.Mollick, other experts and tech-savvy friends, as well as tips from A.I.

companies, I set out to test some theories about writing better prompts for travel planning.I concocted two fictional five-day trips tailored to the two cities I know best: São Paulo, Brazil, and New York.I planned to prompt three bots — ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude — trying both the free and paid versions.

(The paid versions tended to go deeper and work faster, and were less likely to run out of steam.)One twist: I went undercover, using new accounts or “temporary chats” so the bots wouldn’t know that I had lived in the two cities for years.I asked A.I.

to advise a first-time traveler to São Paulo and a veteran New York City visitor who had already seen all the main sights.I was impressed by the results, if not persuaded to give up my old-fashioned predilections for tips from friends, paper guidebooks and late nights of online research.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe....