Here’s how ChatGPT helped me plan a vacation to Japan

“Of course,” was the reassuring reply from ChatGPT when I first asked if it could help me plan a trip abroad. For my first time leaving the country, a reassuring helping hand from a friend, family member or a colleague would have been much easier to digest. Unfortunately, my destination was one where not many of my friends and acquaintances had been to – and that’s where OpenAI’s most popular product came in.

My goals were simple – to visit Japan during the famed cherry blossom season, visit three major cities, and see as much of the beautiful country as I can without overshooting my budget. Yes, I had been doing my own research, but what I needed was a skeletal structure to help me plan this 11-day trip.

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Naturally, I explained this to ChatGPT, using all of 31 words and behold, an itinerary was ready in seconds, covering shrines and shopping streets that I had never heard of, and would have taken hours of research. Yes, I had just begun planning a vacation with the help of ChatGPT on my smartphone, and here’s how it went.

How to plan a vacation using ChatGPT

Before we dive into my experience, here are a few quick pointers on how to get an itinerary out of ChatGPT. Start by a simple command stating where you want to go, and for how many days. You can then add in more information like any particular cities/regions/attractions you want to visit, either in your initial prompt or subsequent ones.

If you want, you can also specify how many days you want in one or more cities, as well as outline your personal interests and preferences so as to tailor the itinerary even more to your taste.

For instance, I started with “Create a travel itinerary for Japan for 11 days. Include attractions across Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka.”

However, my subsequent prompts included information like “I want to spend six days in Tokyo, three days in Kyoto, and the remaining days in Osaka. Also include attractions for me as a Pokémon and anime fan.”

This not only helped me modify the plan according to how much time I wanted to spend in each city, but also highlighted Pokemon and anime-specific attractions in both Tokyo and Osaka. You can also try throwing in other filters in your subsequent prompts like “Include only attractions within walkable distance from the city centre, and exclude all day-trips that require driving.”

Customising my itinerary

A basic initial itinerary by ChatGPT told me that I should be spending three days each in Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, before returning to Tokyo for my flight home. This meant that I could have started working on my bookings and my visa already. However, I decided to test the tool’s limits with some further prompts.

I first demanded for the itinerary to be modified in such a way, that I get to spend six days in Tokyo, and did not need to return to the capital to fly back to India. Immediately a new version was presented where the plan for Tokyo was now sprawled across six days and as a result included more sightseeing destinations.

However, Kyoto was turned into a day trip from Osaka instead of a separate destination. I wasn’t very happy with this. While the two cities were just 30 mins apart, I wanted to spend more time in each city without worrying about the limitations of a day trip.

A final modification where I explicitly specified that I wanted to spend six days in Tokyo, three days in Kyoto and the remaining days in Osaka did the trick. I now had a plan that included all the anime and electronic destinations in Tokyo, all the Sakura blossom spots and shrines in Kyoto, and enough time in Osaka for the signature Dotonbori boat ride and some amazing street food.

All that was required from my end, was about half a day of research on a weekend, that helped to tweak an already well-balanced itinerary to my preferences. The rest was a ‘conversation’ with ChatGPT that barely lasted five minutes, and I suddenly had a full-fledged travel plan.

With minimal changes, I converted ChatGPT’s itinerary into an Excel sheet, and submitted it alongside my visa application documents. Three weeks later my visa was granted. It is clear that the ChatGPT itinerary did the trick. With my plan and budget set, the paperwork sorted all I had to do was leave the country.

Executing the plan

I reached Narita, Tokyo on the evening of April 6, and was set to leave the country 11 days later on the morning of April 17 from Kansai, Osaka. With the time I had in between, I tried my best to stick to the itinerary. To my astonishment as a first-time traveller, who was new to the concept of improvisation – I wasn’t able to do it.

This was because of a lot of factors. My exhausted body was not prepared for the far-off district of Asakusa on Day 2. The weather didn’t allow me to make my day trip to Kawaguchiko and Mount Fuji on Day 3 either. I quickly realised that these were factors that ChatGPT could not account for, and some of these were factors that a human helping me plan the trip could have thought of.

Image shot on Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max

Thankfully, I had made the wise choice of not letting ChatGPT take the wheel completely and had quite a few hours of homework in my brain to tweak things as required. I chose to explore my local neighbourhood of Shinjuku on the few hours left on Day 1 and spent Day 2 exploring the nearby districts of Shibuya and Minato City.

By Day 3, my recharged soul was ready for the rest of the city, and I ventured to the farther parts of the city. By this point, I was not sticking to ChatGPT’s original itinerary day-by-day, but was still able to use it to an extent once my own plan for the day was set.

For instance, when I visited Asakusa on my fifth day in the city (and not second), I already knew I had to hit Senso-JI Shrine, Tokyo Skytree and Akihabara (Tokyo’s famous electronic town) in that order, and that really helped.

All I had to figure out in the moment, was how to get from point A to point B. Thanks to an advanced subway system and fantastic Google Maps, integration, that wasn’t a problem either.

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I had a similar experience in Kyoto between April 12 and April 14, as well as in Osaka between April 15 and April 17. While I could rely on ChatGPT’s planning for the destinations, I had to improvise days and timings as the days went.

By the time I returned to Mumbai on the night of April 17, I realised that the improvisation on my part was a significant effort after all, one that I had initially hoped to avoid by using ChatGPT’s itinerary.

The takeaway

If you ask me if ChatGPT can plan your trip, my answer is going to be both yes, and no.

Yes, because the AI tool is smart enough to figure out what spots to hit in each region you’re travelling to, and how to segregate timings for the different locations you plan on visiting.

No, because despite all its knowledge, ChatGPT will never be able to account for things not going to plan. This could be the volatile weather (a major concern in Japan), your health, or the time spent in hunting for vegetarian food spots (Japan didn’t have many eateries for my pure-veg friend).

This means at some point, making your trip a success story is going to be up to you and your improvisation skills, something that’s only possible if you’ve done a bit of the legwork yourself ahead of time.

Image shot on Apple iPhone 15

Relying on ChatGPT also means missing out on the countless tips you can get from online resources like YouTube vlogs by real people who have been to the country and have already faced the problems you’re likely to face.

For instance, it was only by scouring through YouTube videos that I found out about Osaka’s city-wide pass that includes unlimited subway travel and free entries into attractions and ended up saving a lot of money.

To sum it all up, yes ChatGPT helped plan my trip, but by the end of it, what made it work was my own research. We’re still a long way from letting AI plan trips in such a way that you can blindly trust an itinerary that was created in seconds. Doing so right now would be rather unwise.

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Yes, you can modify your itinerary quite a bit right at the beginning, but to prompt ChatGPT to make the 50th version of an itinerary that suits you best, the prompt-giver (you) needs to be well-versed around the destination to an extent, making the whole process a catch-22 where you cannot escape doing the harder parts of planning by yourself.

That said, ChatGPT is an excellent resource to “help” with planning your next vacation. You can use it to build the basic structure of an itinerary, something that’s useful if you’re starting from scratch and don’t know much about the country you’re visiting.

This is also helpful if you’re in a hurry to create an itinerary for your visa application. You can always change the finer details based on your personal research later on.

So yes, if you’re headed somewhere new this summer, be sure to give ChatGPT a shot to help with the planning. Just remember to not follow everything blindly, and instead, use the pointers as a steppingstone for your own research and planning.