People Using ChatGPT Hack to Travel to Europe for Less than $1,000 (Here's How)

More and more travelers are turning to ChatGPT for budget flight and travel planning.

Whether by bot operators booking up flights or airlines and travel sites experimenting with ChatGPT-powered customer service, artificial intelligence is steadily seeping into the travel industry.

At the start of May, American Airlines American  (AAL) - Get Free Report joined other airlines in the fight against the "use of a robotic or automated process[es]" and stopped allowing customers to book one flight time and then change it without incurring a fee.

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On the search for lower fares, many people been enlisting artificial intelligence to scan different flight aggregators. Some have also been asking ChatGPT to give them options for budget-friendly travel.

How Some Travelers Enlist ChatGPT To Score Flight Deals

A travel editor for EuroNews, Angela Symons recently asked the chatbot built by OpenAI how to plan a "plan the most sustainable, budget friendly trip to Amsterdam from 26 to 28 May 2023."

The platform recommended some hostels starting at €34 (roughly $37.58 USD) for a shared room and €85 (roughly $93.94 USD) for a private one. It also threw out suggestions to take the £15 train (roughly $18.83 USD) and £50 ferry (roughly $62.78 USD) from London, which is where the writer is based.

In a video that gathered over 300,000 views, travel TikToker Madison Rolley also asked ChatGPT to "create a travel itinerary for two weeks in Europe where we would fly in and depart from Stockholm." She asked that the itinerary include "anywhere from four to six cities" and come in at under $1,000.

The chatbot responded going through Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona and Copenhagen and suggested routes and accommodation that would fall within budget.

"[ChatGPT] broke it down with how much you should expend to spend on travel as well as the estimated cost for all of your night stays, three meals a day for the whole trip and estimated attraction costs for all total attractions that it recommended," Rolley says in the video.

While this type of itinerary does not take into account one's personal preferences and whether one is satisfied with the cheapest options provided, one can get more detailed recommendations by asking more specific questions.

As many also pointed out under the post, some prices may rely on older prices and may be different when people go to book. While the only way to make sure is to manually go through the itinerary and see if it lines up, the tool has been helping some travelers see what's available or get a rough outline for inspiration.

"Usually fleshing out these kinds of itineraries takes hours and ChatGPT just spit it out in a couple of minutes," Rolley told her followers. 

Both in the travel industry and other domains, widespread adoption of artificial intelligence is often criticized for making certain jobs irrelevant and influencing the cost of travel — when bots scan different sites and snap up the cheapest available ones before humans can get, airlines often end up raising prices.

But more and more, travelers are tapping into the technology themselves to see what options it can throw out at them while travel companies are using it to automate certain aspects of customer service.

"The OTAs [Online Travel Agencies] have already proved two of the main uses of ChatGPT in travel: trip planning and customer service,” Max Starkov, a hospitality and travel industry consultant, recently told CNBC.