Arylene Westlake-Jennings: How AI helped me solve my holiday planning nightmare

An email from the after-school care club sent me into a panic.

“Spring holiday program — book now!,” it declared.

All it really told me was NOT prepared for our family’s overseas holiday during the September break, the one for which we had booked tickets in February.

I had picked up the holiday planning sporadically, booking accommodation as I stumbled upon deals and particularly in April when I had to vie for hotel rooms at Disneyland on a questionably translated foreign language website.

Then any real work had halted as the year was peppered with interstate travels and one cancelled trip to see my parents.

But here I am, little over a month out from the day we fly off, faced with not much more than a few beds locked in and a half-baked packing list that was clearly already over the top (the kids really don’t need that many pairs of underwear, do they?).

So what did my anxiety-ridden self decide was the next best idea? Get AI to plan my trip for me.

There are myriad AI travel planners, but several churned out the equivalent of a TripAdvisor listicle. Laughable at best.

Then I asked my new-found friend Gemini, or Google’s equivalent of ChatGPT, and it delivered a passable starting point, to which I fed more specifics and am now carting around a military ops-style itinerary that would have done my pre-children self proud.

“Kids, we’re on flight Sierra-Quebec two-two-niner, departing at twelve hundred hours. Your packs need to be in the vehicle by zero nine hundred.”

Sounds like a plan to me. Now back to my 12-page packing spreadsheet.