We’ve been using AI to help plan trips for a couple of years now. From our home in Rovaniemi we’ve done it for weekend hops to Tallinn, for a week through the Greek islands, for the Norway fjords, for Singapore with a layover to plan in 24 hours. And over the past few months, ahead of summer 2026, Alla — who studies AI engineering — put together a proper test of the main tools people are actually using.

This is not a ranking based on press releases or feature lists. We actually opened each tool, gave it the same real planning brief, and tracked where it helped and where it fell flat. Here is what we found.

What we actually tested — and how

Our test brief was a real trip we were planning: a 10-day summer route from Helsinki through Stockholm and Copenhagen, ending in a week on the Norwegian fjords. We needed flights, accommodation ideas, a rough day-by-day itinerary, local eating recommendations, and a packing note for mixed coastal and hiking weather.

We gave the same brief — word for word — to each tool. We also gave each tool a follow-up question that would reveal whether it could handle nuance: “We like interesting neighbourhoods over tourist centres, we’re a couple without kids, we care about food, and we’ve already done the obvious things in each city.”

What we were scoring on

• Accuracy: were the opening hours, prices, and logistics actually correct?
• Nuance: did it pick up on our preferences or give a generic tourist list?
• Speed: how many follow-up prompts did it take to get something usable?
• Live data: could it pull current prices, weather, or travel advisories?
• Honesty: did it admit when it didn’t know something, or did it confidently hallucinate?

The tools: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Layla, Mindtrip

Here is what we found for each tool in real use. These are not affiliate opinions — we pay for the ones we use and have no commercial relationship with any of them.

ChatGPT (GPT-4o)

• Best for: building structured itineraries from scratch, rewriting and adapting on request, generating packing lists, writing hotel inquiry emails.
• How it performed: the first itinerary it gave was good but generic. After two follow-up prompts with our preferences, it became genuinely useful — suggesting the right neighbourhood in Copenhagen (Nørrebro over the canal district) and flagging that our dates overlapped with a major Copenhagen festival that changes logistics.
• Weakness: no live data. It doesn’t know current ferry prices or whether a restaurant closed three months ago. Treat it as a smart travel companion, not a live search engine.
• Verdict: still the most versatile. If you can only use one tool, this is probably it.

Claude (claude.ai)

• Best for: deep research, longer planning documents, nuanced destination comparison, writing that needs a genuine voice.
• How it performed: out of all six tools, Claude gave the most honest answer to our nuance question. It acknowledged when it was uncertain about specific local spots and suggested how to verify them. Its itinerary was slightly less punchy than ChatGPT’s but more considered — it flagged that the Oslo-to-Bergen train books out fast in summer and told us exactly when to check.
• Weakness: no live web browsing in the base version. Also can be verbose if you don’t tell it to be concise.
• Verdict: Alla uses this for anything that requires real research depth. Joona reaches for ChatGPT first for quick structured outputs. We pair them.

Google Gemini

• Best for: integrating with Google services (Maps, Flights, Hotels). If your workflow already lives in Google, Gemini can pull those results in.
• How it performed: the Google integration is genuinely useful — it can pull live flight options and hotel results inline. However, the itinerary quality was noticeably weaker than ChatGPT or Claude on nuance. It defaulted to the most-visited attractions even after our follow-up prompt.
• Weakness: the AI layer feels bolted onto Google search rather than truly reasoning about your trip.
• Verdict: useful for flight and hotel price research alongside a dedicated AI. Less useful as a standalone trip planner.

Perplexity AI

• Best for: real-time web search with cited sources. This is where it genuinely separates itself from the others.
• How it performed: when we asked “what are the best neighbourhood restaurants in Bergen right now?” it pulled recent reviews, flagged a chef change at one well-known spot, and gave us source links to verify. No other tool came close on live, sourced information.
• Weakness: not great at building a full structured itinerary. Better for answering specific, time-sensitive questions than producing a day-by-day plan.
• Verdict: we use Perplexity to verify and update things that ChatGPT or Claude gave us. It’s the fact-checker in our workflow.

Layla (by Scope Travel)

• Best for: travelers who want a purpose-built travel AI that handles the full booking workflow in one interface.
• How it performed: Layla was more conversational than the others and asked better clarifying questions upfront. Its accommodation recommendations pulled live availability. For a traveler who doesn’t want to stitch tools together, Layla feels the most like a real travel agent.
• Weakness: still limited in depth on destination research outside popular routes. For Nordic travel beyond Oslo and Stockholm it felt thinner.
• Verdict: the best pick for travelers who want one tool and a simpler experience. Less powerful for power users who want to go deep.

Mindtrip

• Best for: visual trip planning with map-based itineraries. The interface is genuinely good-looking.
• How it performed: the visual itinerary builder is impressive and the map view makes spatial planning intuitive. The underlying AI quality felt closer to an early ChatGPT version than GPT-4o, though — the recommendations were generic and it struggled with our nuance prompt.
• Weakness: style over substance at this point. The interface is ahead of the AI behind it.
• Verdict: worth watching as it develops. Not our go-to for summer 2026 but a tool to revisit.

Quick-reference: which AI tool for which task

Use this as your decision shortcut when you’re starting a trip and wondering which tool to open first.

Tips for getting the best results from AI travel tools

• Be specific about your travel style from the first prompt. “We’re a couple in our thirties who like independent restaurants, quiet mornings, and neighbourhood walks over organised tours” produces completely different output than “plan a trip to Copenhagen.”
• Always give it your exact dates and a rough budget. AI itineraries without constraints are generic tourist lists. Constraints force it to make real choices.
• Treat the first output as a draft, not a final plan. The first itinerary is almost never the right one. The value is in the iteration.
• Ask for the downsides. “What are the main reasons someone wouldn’t enjoy this destination in June?” surfaces information that the average promotional article hides.
• Verify time-sensitive details externally. AI knowledge cuts off at a point in the past. Use Perplexity or the actual venue website for current hours, prices, and reservation requirements.
• Use it to write, not just to research. AI is excellent at drafting the emails, packing lists, and booking requests that eat up pre-trip time.

Honest limitations of AI trip planning in 2026

We’re enthusiastic users of these tools but we want to be honest about where they still fall short, especially for less mainstream travel.

• Knowledge cutoffs mean stale data. Most AI models have a training cutoff of several months to a year ago. Restaurants close, routes change, visa rules update. Always verify anything operational.
• They overfit to popular destinations. Ask about Oslo or Copenhagen and you’ll get depth. Ask about a smaller Norwegian fjord village or a Finnish national park off the main trail and the quality drops significantly. Local blogs and community forums still beat AI on genuinely obscure destinations.
• Confident hallucination is still a risk. AI tools occasionally state specific facts — opening hours, distances, prices — with complete confidence when they’re simply wrong. The risk is lower than it was two years ago but it hasn’t disappeared.
• They can’t replace the feel of a place. An AI itinerary optimises logistically. It doesn’t know that the neighbourhood it suggested feels better on a Tuesday morning than a Saturday afternoon, or that the harbour walk is best done after the tourist boats leave at 6 pm.
• Language and accessibility gaps remain. For destinations where local-language sources are essential — booking a cottage in rural Finland, navigating a local transport app in Japan — AI quality varies significantly by language capability.

Mistakes we made using AI travel tools

• Trusting ferry schedules from ChatGPT. It gave us a confident timetable for a Faroe Islands ferry that hadn’t operated on that schedule for over a year. Perplexity caught it; the official site confirmed it. Always check live.
• Not specifying the trip type early enough. Our first brief was too vague (“plan a Nordic trip”) and the output was useless. The second, with exact dates, cities, travel style, and budget, took two minutes longer to write and produced something 10x more useful.
• Using AI for restaurant recommendations without a recency check. Three out of eight restaurants one tool confidently recommended had either closed or changed concept. We now treat all restaurant suggestions as starting points to verify on Google Maps.
• Letting the AI plan too tight a schedule. AI itineraries tend to be slightly optimistic about transit times and slightly underestimate how long you’ll want to linger somewhere good. We now ask it to build in one genuinely empty afternoon per three days.
• Not saving the conversation. We had a great, detailed itinerary built up over a long ChatGPT session and lost it when we closed the browser tab. Now we copy anything we want to keep into a notes file as we go.
• Expecting it to know our personal taste without telling it. AI doesn’t know you. Every session starts fresh. The more context you give it about who you are and how you travel, the better the output.

Frequently asked questions

A final word from Rovaniemi

We’ve been using AI tools long enough to have watched them go from interesting novelty to genuine workflow staple. The tools available in summer 2026 are meaningfully better than what existed two years ago — more nuanced, more honest about uncertainty, more useful on follow-up.

But the thing we keep coming back to is this: the AI is only as good as the person using it. The travelers who get the best results are the ones who know their own travel style well enough to brief the tool properly, who treat the output as a starting draft rather than a finished plan, and who verify anything operational before they turn up at a ferry terminal expecting a boat that stopped running in 2024.

We’re a couple who lives in the Arctic and has used these tools to plan trips across 21 countries. We’re not selling a course on AI travel planning. We just find this genuinely useful and wanted to share what actually works, so you can spend less time researching tools and more time actually going places.

Happy planning — and let us know which tool you end up reaching for first.

— Joona & Alla, Rovaniemi