There is a stage in every traveller’s life when the planning is the trip. The tab with the flight search, the second tab with the hotel map, the slow dawning that everything good in Copenhagen is expensive in November. This is not wasted time. This is the holiday happening early, in your head, for free.
What Silicon Valley is now proposing, with its usual gift for missing the point of a good thing, is to outsource that part too. AI agents are, we keep hearing, the Next Big Thing: textable little employees that live in iMessage or WhatsApp and can search the web, use software and run your errands. Concierge, assistant, au pair for your to-do list. Business Insider’s Pete Syme gave one the job of planning two trips — a work jaunt and a weekend break — and came away underwhelmed enough to wonder what travel is actually for.
The spreadsheet triumph
First, the assignment where the machine was built to win. Syme, who lives in London, invented a three-night business trip to Business Insider’s New York headquarters (Meta’s Muse agent isn’t available outside the US, so he borrowed a colleague’s invite to Use Instinct). Checked bag, no overnight flights — sleeping on a plane being, for him, a goal both tantalizing and impossible.
Doing it himself took half an hour on Google Flights and Booking.com, plus a look at transit costs and the company meal policy, and produced a rough budget of $2,000. Instinct took about ten minutes and produced a four-page document, complete with paragraphs explaining its reasoning, a schedule and links to its sources. Twice the paperwork, a third of the time. If joy were measured in pages, the machine would already have cornered the market.
Except the agent then recommended flying out on Delta Air Lines and home on British Airways — two airlines it is impossible to book on the same ticket, the kind of thing anyone who has ever done this by hand learns once and never forgets. Flagged, the agent took six minutes to fix it, returning with a daytime Virgin Atlantic flight for about $130 extra (Delta owns a 49% stake in Virgin, so the two can be booked through each other). The final budget matched Syme’s own $2,000, and he concedes the agent might well have caught the error itself had he actually let it book. For travel you don’t care about — precise costs, corporate budgets, a destination chosen by someone in another department — he judged it pretty nifty. Double-check everything, naturally. As with all AI tools.
The Amsterdam problem
Then came the fun one, and here the whole premise quietly fell apart. The brief was deliberately open: a European city with a top art gallery, sometime in November, maybe by Eurostar if the price was right. In other words, a daydream with a budget attached.
On his own, the daydream took about twenty minutes to settle on Amsterdam — one of five cities reachable by direct Eurostar from London, and home to the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum, which between them contain essentially all the art November requires. Instinct took half an hour just to return a list of five candidate cities with ballpark budgets. It then suggested Syme narrow the field to two, and took another twenty-three minutes to deliver dates, hotels and transport. Fifty-three minutes, all told, during which ChatGPT produced a similar city list in three. Syme reports that his enthusiasm waned; that visions of sunflowers and canals receded as boredom set in. He allows he may be exaggerating slightly. The reader suspects he is not.
This is worth pausing on, because Business Insider staffers recently spent a week handing errands to Muse and Instinct and found a similar pattern wherever the task had a soul, so to speak. The agents cope with errands. The errands that involve wanting something — picturing it, weighing it, talking yourself into it — are precisely the ones where the wanting is the activity. An agent that plans your dream holiday is a vending machine for a meal you were looking forward to cooking.
Credit where it is due: the agent’s genuinely clever trick was taking the measurements of Syme’s carry-on bag and working out which airlines would charge him extra for it, sparing him a tour of seventeen near-identical baggage policies. It also picked an Amsterdam hotel he didn’t love — cramped, tacky rooms, he judged — and quoted Eurostar fares about $30 higher than the prices on Eurostar’s own site, which usefully displays the cheapest fares across a whole month. So: slower than doing it yourself, dearer than doing it yourself, and with worse taste in soft furnishings.
A concierge in a rubber mask
And then there is the small matter of the thing’s manners. Chatting with the agent over WhatsApp, Syme found, felt uncanny — a performance of human conversation without any humans in it. The agent splits its replies into separate messages, the way a friend might. His phone pinged four times during one exchange, including once so the agent could swap its emoji reaction to a checkbox once the task was done. That last detail deserves a moment of silence. Somewhere, a product manager decided that what the busy modern traveller craves is a robot that first reacts to your message with a little face and then, work completed, switches the face to a tick. The friend who texts like this is not your friend.
Syme’s own verdict, after the experiment, splits the difference. For a chatbot-style brainstorm of where to go, chatbots are fast and fine, though even that sucked away some of the fun of picturing the ideal trip. For the expensive, forgettable logistics of corporate travel, the agent earns its keep — with the standard rider that you must check its work, because it will confidently pair two airlines that cannot share a ticket.
Which leaves the agents in an odd spot. Their makers promise a concierge, but a concierge’s whole value is that you trust him with the things that matter. What Instinct has built, on this evidence, is an intern: fast, thorough on paper, prone to one classic beginner’s mistake, and best supervised. There is nothing wrong with hiring an intern. Just don’t ask him to have your holiday for you. He will take fifty-three minutes, and he will miss.