Gemini is a digital Swiss Army knife for planning flights, activities and routes, but it isn’t perfect. Why did it forget to put underwear on the packing list?
Trip planning can feel like a slog, full of chores that artificial intelligence chatbots should be able to speed up. The technology was still bad a couple of years ago. Is it up to the task yet?
As the personal tech columnist for The New York Times and a frequent traveler, I was eager to test whether A.I. could streamline the planning process, which typically takes me hours of reading travel guides and plugging information into notepads and spreadsheets.
I was mapping out the details for a 14-day trip last month to Taiwan and Hong Kong with my wife and our 20-month-old daughter, and I also wanted help planning an upcoming summer vacation to Hawaii.
I had plenty of options, including piecemeal apps that use A.I. to book flights as well as popular chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude. Because I’ve found that it’s usually easier to stick with a single app rather than toggle between a bunch, I decided to focus on one.
I chose Google’s Gemini chatbot app for two reasons. First, unlike the other chatbots, Gemini was already hooked into Google’s extensive resources for finding flights and places to eat, and second, I wanted to test it alongside Ask Maps, a new A.I. feature built into the Google Maps app.
The good news: The Gemini chatbot, which was recently improved to give more bespoke responses based on personal data, and Ask Maps were a potent combination that saved me time, especially with researching restaurants and tourist attractions. I spent only about 30 minutes planning my activities in Taiwan and Hong Kong.