ChatGPT plans the perfect holiday for you… to places that don't exist
More and more people are using ChatGPT to plan their vacations, but it's not without risk. Travelers often end up in places that only exist in the imagination of artificial intelligence.
A Malaysian couple drove 290 kilometers to visit a cable car that never existed. Moroccan influencer Chaimae Lebyed (26) had to cancel her trip to Fiji because ChatGPT wrongly told her she didn't need a visa. "I still use it for ideas," she says, "but I check everything with official sources."
They're not the only ones to have fallen prey to the popular AI tool's teething problems. American travel influencer Madison Rolley (27) used ChatGPT to plan a budget-friendly two-week trip through Europe. When she arrived in Split, Croatia, for breakfast at a "recommended" cafe, she found only cleaners: the cafe turned out to be a restaurant that only opened in the evening.
According to the British newspaper The Times, the number of Britons using AI to plan their trips doubled in the past year. Young people, in particular, rely on ChatGPT, although this sometimes leads to painful surprises. Australian Mark Pollard (47) was even denied entry to Chile after ChatGPT assured him he didn't need a visa.
Digital marketing companies have also discovered how easily AI gets caught up in fiction. The company Search Atlas invented the non-existent American city of "Snackachusetts" as an experiment. Within a week, the city appeared in search results from generative AIs, including Google's Gemini, as if it were a real destination.
According to Anil Doshi, a researcher atUniversity College London, some of this behavior can be explained psychologically: “We trust AI because it often works well, and then we forget that it can’t do everything.” Nevertheless, he claims that the technology is improving rapidly and increasingly works with real-time data rather than fabrications.
Tourism expert Michael Reece of Berkeley Travel emphasizes that AI can be a useful tool, but not a replacement for real experience and human insight: "We know which hotel manager can arrange the best room or where you can get an impossible table, ChatGPT can't do that yet."
A useful tip for travelers: feel free to let ChatGPT help you think about your destination, but always check before departure whether the place on your
list actually exists.
