Nowadays, planning a vacation should be a breather. With the whole knowledge of the internet at our fingertips and with such platforms as Booking, Viator, and Rome2Rio easily available, it seems like organizing the tour of your dreams should barely take any effort at all. But as always, the devil is in the details. So let’s talk about why so many people still prefer to delegate the responsibility of organizing their vacations to travel specialists.
Why Use a Travel Agent Instead of Booking Online
Planning Takes Time
Even if you have a clear idea of what you want, planning is time-consuming, especially if you are going somewhere for the first time. Picking out the suppliers among hundreds of offers, researching the restaurants not to miss, reading the reviews on the hotels that seem like a good option—everything takes time. And while some people don’t mind spending hours on meticulous research, others prefer to spend it on themselves or with their loved ones while our team takes care of the boring part.
Technical Side of Booking a Trip is Not Everyone’s Cup of Tea
Dreaming about what you want to do when you get to Rome and actually putting together an itinerary around your wishes are two very different things. Sure, it doesn’t take much to book a hotel for a few nights, just as there is no shortage of guides offering their services. But it takes a village to coordinate your connections, hotels, and activities; double and triple check the time slots to make sure that your schedule is comfortable and easy to navigate; and deal with any additional issues like bounced payments or different time zones. Of course, everyone is capable of doing that, but a lot of people find the technical side of booking a trip tedious and prefer to let someone else handle it.
Expertise Matters
Dreaming about what you want to do when you get to Rome and actually putting together an itinerary around your wishes are two very different things. Sure, it doesn’t take much to book a hotel for a few nights, just as there is no shortage of guides offering their services. But it takes a village to coordinate your connections, hotels, and activities; double and triple check the time slots to make sure that your schedule is comfortable and easy to navigate; and deal with any additional issues like bounced payments or different time zones. Of course, everyone is capable of doing that, but a lot of people find the technical side of booking a trip tedious and prefer to let someone else handle it.
Reliable, Up-To-Date Information
Of course, we don’t know everything. And this is why we have a wide network of local suppliers all around Europe, to make sure that we always keep our fingers on the pulse, get regular updates about the situation in all destinations we work with, and adapt what we offer to people who want to travel with us accordingly. Surprises can be great, but no one wants to deal with the blocked city center due to the strikes or bedbugs in your hotel room (looking at you, Paris).
We Take Stress Out of the Experience
Let’s wrap up on something as beautifully simple as that. We live in a world that runs at a crazy speed, and vacations are the time to let ourselves slow down. So making someone else handle everything that is more taxing than a choice of where to have dinner tonight is one of the nicest things you can give yourself for your next holiday.
And What About AI-Generated Itineraries?
Another tool gaining popularity among travelers who prefer to take care of their own vacations is, of course, AI-generated itineraries. There is no arguing that ChatGPT and other similar platforms are excellent assets in many fields, and can show incredible results when tasked with things they can do well, but travel planning is not among them. There is no doubt that it has great potential to be a powerful tool for building your vacations, but at the moment, it’s still in the early stages of getting there.
While ChatGPT is able to generate very convincing text, it has no understanding of what it is talking about. It simply went through all the internet (the good, the bad, the awful) and created a massive database of texts that it uses to predict which word it should put next to all the previous words it sees. It’s constantly learning, parsing through everything ever written it can get its metaphorical hands on, to enlarge its database. And there are a few issues with that. The first is that any new expert content created daily is drowning in the vast ocean of substainless information of little value we are bombarded with (AI generated included), so while the AI’s answers do become more accurate every day statistically speaking, whether they become more useful is another question entirely. And the second issue is that regardless of how big ChaptGPT’s database is, it still isn’t sentient.
Any advice it can offer doesn’t come from personal experience or a genuine desire to help, but from statistical analyses of what has been said all over the internet on the subject. And the same goes for the generated itineraries; they are not carefully crafted to give you the best possible experience; they just summarize the unfiltered information available on the subject you asked about. Now, compare it to the way we craft our programs, and you will see why we are not worried about AI replacing us just yet. And, if you are looking for inspiration for your itinerary, why not just go to the website of any trusted travel company that appeals to you and check out what they offer on top of asking AI for tips? This way, you can not only see where you can go and what to do there, but also check out the adjusted logistics and evaluate the free time/activity balance you need to keep in mind when crafting your vacation.
Of course, planning a vacation by yourself is still a very valid option, and a lot of people genuinely enjoy doing that. But those who don’t can always count on us to share our expertise and bring their travel dreams to life.
