An AI trip planner is an app in which you describe a trip in a sentence or two, and an AI model drafts a day-by-day plan with flights, hotels and things to do. You can then change the plan, and your friends can edit it with you. Pilot is one Indian company building such an app.
Planning a trip used to mean many browser tabs: a blog for ideas, a map to check distances, a travel site for flights and a spreadsheet to share with friends. An AI trip planner puts all of these in one place.
The app uses a large language model (LLM), a model trained on huge amounts of text that can read and write it. You type a request. The app adds details to it, such as your dates and budget, and sends it to the model. The model writes a draft plan. The app then checks the draft against live data. It confirms that each place is open on that day, measures travel times on a map, and finds real flights and hotels with current prices. The model alone cannot be trusted with these facts. It can suggest a museum that is closed on Mondays, or a hotel that has shut down.
Say five college friends in Mangaluru want five days in Vietnam in December, for under ₹70,000 each. One of them types exactly that. The app suggests two days in Hanoi, a night on a boat in Ha Long Bay and two days in Da Nang. It shows flights from Bengaluru with one change, and hotels that fit the budget. It puts the plan on a shared page. Two of the friends vote to replace Da Nang with Hoi An. The app updates the hotels and the travel time between the cities. When all five agree, it opens the bookings on an online travel agency, and each friend pays separately.
The next step is for an AI agent to book the whole plan by itself, after the group approves it. For that, the agent needs a way to pay and proof that the traveller allowed it to spend. This is called agentic payments. It is part of a larger change, described in agentic commerce.
One question is still open: where will people plan their trips? They may plan on travel sites, or in general AI assistants that book through travel sites. Every large travel company is now building its own assistant.