I write about Australian travel for a living, which means I plan a lot of itineraries - mine, friends’, readers’. AI tools have changed how I do this work over the past eighteen months. Not in the way I expected, and not always for the better. This is what I’ve learned about using these tools well for trips around our continent.

The problem with generic AI travel planning

Type “plan me a 10-day trip to Australia” into any of the major AI assistants and you’ll get a confident-sounding itinerary that mostly works. You’ll also get specific errors that someone with no Australian context wouldn’t catch.

I tested this last week with three different tools and got, between them: a recommendation to drive from Cairns to Uluru in two days (it’s a 38-hour drive); a suggestion to visit Cradle Mountain in February without mentioning leech season; advice to “try the famous Gold Coast wineries” (Gold Coast hinterland has a few small ones, but it’s not a wine region anyone goes to specifically); and a recommendation for a restaurant in Hobart that closed in 2023.

Confident, plausible, wrong. This is the failure mode of every AI tool right now and it hasn’t gotten meaningfully better in eighteen months.

Where AI trip planning genuinely helps

That said, there are specific tasks where AI saves me real hours.

Pulling together logistics for a known itinerary. If I tell the tool I’m spending day three in Hobart, day four in the Huon Valley, day five back to Hobart for the flight - it can quickly generate a packing checklist, suggest what time to leave for the airport given Hobart traffic, and remind me about things I’d forget. This is a time-saver, not a creative task.

Translation and accessibility checks. When planning trips for international friends, getting translations of restaurant menus, ferry schedules, or accommodation policies is much faster with AI than it used to be.

First-pass destination research. Tell the AI you have a week, you like food, you don’t want to drive much, and you’re starting in Sydney - the answer (“look at Tasmania, fly direct, base in Hobart and do day trips”) is often the right shape, even if the specifics need fact-checking.

Generating alternative itineraries to react to. I find I do better work when I’m reacting to something than when I’m staring at a blank page. AI generates a flawed first draft, I tear it apart and rebuild, end up with something better than I’d have written cold.

My current workflow

When I’m planning a 7-14 day Australian trip for a reader, here’s roughly what I do:

1. Brief intake from the reader - dates, budget, who’s travelling, what they want from the trip, what they want to avoid
2. Use an AI tool to generate three different itinerary skeletons based on different priorities (food-led, nature-led, cities-led)
3. Strip out everything I can’t verify or know to be wrong
4. Add my own knowledge of operators, accommodations, restaurants, road conditions
5. Cross-check timing against Tourism Australia’s seasonal guides and current operator websites
6. Send draft to reader for feedback

Step 2 used to take me two hours. Now it takes ten minutes. Steps 3-5 still take the same time as before because the verification work is what makes the itinerary actually usable.

The mistakes I keep seeing

Friends planning their own trips are increasingly using AI tools and getting into trouble in predictable ways.

The most common is wildly underestimating Australian distances. Outside the southeast corner, our distances are vast. AI tools that work fine for European trips will cheerfully suggest impossible drives here. Always check actual driving times - and add 20% for fatigue stops, fuel and the inevitable photo break.

The second is missing seasonal issues. Top End in the wet season, Tasmania in winter, far north Queensland in stinger season - these aren’t just “less ideal,” they fundamentally change what’s possible. AI tools rarely flag this with appropriate emphasis.

The third is recommending closed or changed businesses. The training data is anywhere from six months to two years old depending on the tool. Restaurants close, walks get rerouted, ferries change schedules. Verify everything before booking.

Tools worth trying

The best AI trip planner I’ve used for Australian trips this year is Mindtrip, which has reasonable Australian coverage and surfaces sources you can verify. Google’s Gemini-based travel features are improving, particularly for last-minute itinerary tweaks. ChatGPT with web browsing is fine for general questions if you treat every specific recommendation as a prompt to verify, not a final answer.

Don’t pay for travel-specific AI subscriptions yet. The differences between paid and free tiers aren’t enough to matter for the use case, and the rate of change in this space means whatever you subscribe to today will be outpaced by something free in three months.

Where I’d rather use a human

The places I still wouldn’t use AI:

Anything involving Indigenous cultural sites or experiences. The respect, context and protocol around these need a human guide or a properly briefed operator. AI summaries flatten what should be specific and considered.

Booking small operators. Many of the best Australian experiences are run by people with bad websites and no Google presence. They won’t show up in any AI tool’s recommendations because the data isn’t there. Word of mouth and time spent on regional tourism sites still finds these.

Anything where the schedule is tight enough that a small error wastes a whole day. Multi-day hikes with weather windows, ferry-dependent island trips, narrow flight connections - these need verification by a human who has done them recently.

Looking forward

AI travel planning will keep improving. The tools will get current data, better local context, more accurate distance and timing calculations. The basic shape of itinerary planning is solvable.

What won’t change is the value of judgement - knowing which restaurant in Margaret River is currently worth the drive, which guide in Kakadu treats their team well, which season is right for which activity. That stays human work for a while yet.

For now, use AI tools as a fast first draft. Don’t trust them as a final answer. And if you’re planning a trip that matters - honeymoon, milestone birthday, once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing - book a human who actually knows the region.