Travellers are increasingly turning to tools like ChatGPT for quick itinerary inspiration. The appeal is obvious: type in a destination, a budget and a few preferences, and out comes a ready-made plan—neatly organised, confidently worded and full of suggestions.
But a BBC Travel article by Lynn Brown highlights a growing problem with letting AI plan your next trip: sometimes the recommendations aren’t just slightly off—they can be entirely fictional.
## The lure of frictionless trip planning
Planning travel can be time-consuming: comparing neighbourhoods, checking opening hours, mapping distances and sorting logistics. AI tools promise to compress that work into seconds, producing itineraries that feel tailored and authoritative.
The article notes that more travellers are using these systems for travel ideas, signalling a shift in how people brainstorm routes, sights and even entire destinations.
## The perils: confident details, questionable reality
The central warning is simple and unsettling: AI can send people to places that don’t exist.
The article points to striking examples—an imagined town in Peru, and even an “Eiffel tower in Beijing.” These aren’t minor errors like a restaurant that closed last month. They’re the kind of hallucinated “facts” that could derail a trip, waste money and create real stress once you’re on the ground.
## What this means for travellers
The takeaway from the piece isn’t that AI has no place in travel planning. It’s that travellers should treat AI-generated itineraries as a starting point for ideas, not a final plan to follow blindly.
Because when a tool can invent destinations with the same polished certainty it uses to describe real ones, the responsibility to verify the basics—what exists, where it is, and what’s actually there—still lands with the person packing the suitcase.
As the BBC article suggests, the convenience of AI travel planning comes with a new kind of risk: not just bad advice, but fabricated geography presented as if it were a trusted guidebook.
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