From rushing to catch a flight to panicking mid-air about how to reach a foreign hotel, travel anxiety may soon be a thing of the past as artificial intelligence promises to make the whole experience seamless, if perhaps a little too predictable.
Two global travel platforms are launching apps with OpenAI to offer the platform’s 900 million weekly users access to routes, prices and transport options worldwide.
Rome2Rio and its German parent company, Omio, have announced they are launching apps options within ChatGPT which will allow users to search, compare and plan journeys across trains, buses, flights, ferries and other modes of transportation.
Finding the best route between two cities often means juggling multiple booking sites to piece together connections — but new AI-powered apps are changing that.
Users can simply ask “What’s the fastest and cheapest route from Rome to Florence this Saturday?” and get everything in a single conversation.
One in three travellers is already using AI to plan trips, often turning to the technology before they even decide on a destination, according to Rome2Rio’s research.
Despite AI being far from perfect yet and being able to hallucinate and make things up, the travel companies say they use live data and not AI-generated estimates.
“There’s a real train, there’s a real bus, a ferry — and it’s all connected via API, deep technical integrations,” said Naren Shaam, founder and CEO of Omio told Euronews Next.
“Anything built off of that is real content.”
The technology is designed to reduce AI hallucination by pulling from a verified inventory rather than generating approximate travel information, he added.
AI may also help the travel experience as it can tell you about disruptions and provide alternate routes, Shaam said.
“If there is a disruption on a line we should, in theory, send you a message saying, ‘Hey, there’s likely a disruption. Here are a couple of alternate options to consider,'” he said, adding that while last-minute changes may cost more, the goal is to make travel “a lot more transparent and help customers make sound decisions”.
Despite the convenience AI brings to travel, there is a fear that if everyone uses it to plan their routes and their holidays, already over-touristed areas may become even more populated.
And will an algorithm take away the wanderlust of travel, stumbling across an unexpected route, discovering a town not on any itinerary and making a split-second decision at a station?
AI systems are trained on popularity data, they reinforce existing patterns, meaning they may nudge users to the same routes and travel adventures that already dominate internet search results.
Shaam acknowledges the risk, but argues the effect can also go the other way.
“AI can empower people to discover more routes,” he said. “You have to trigger more questions for it to go deeper into context to give more unique itineraries.”
The idea is that conversational AI, unlike a search bar, invites follow-up questions and may lead a user, who was asking about where to spend a night in Madrid, to ask about other parts of Spain.
Shaam also argues that AI-driven discovery could help spread tourism beyond overcrowded major cities, nudging travellers toward rail and bus connections to secondary destinations.
“If you go to Spain and you’re not only going to Madrid and Barcelona, but Seville, Granada, Bilbao — those are two, two-and-a-half hour train journeys,” he said.
“If AI can make that trip happen, it’s good for local ecosystems too.”
For now, Omio frames AI as a tool that handles logistics, leaving the spirit of adventure intact.