Commentary: Will AI help or wreck your next holiday?

CNA

5 days ago

TOKYO: On a recent trip to Taiwan, I turned to ChatGPT to ask for recommendations for the best beef noodles in my area – with the very specific request that the shop had to accept credit cards, as I was running low on my stash of local currency.
The chatbot immediately recommended a place that was a short walk and featured some of the most delicious, melt-in-your mouth beef tendon I've ever had. I was pleased to be the only foreigner in the no-frills, no air-conditioning joint that was home to a fat, orange cat taking a nap under one of the metal stools. But after my meal, I panicked when the impatient woman behind the counter had to put aside the dumplings she was folding to try and communicate in English to me that it was cash only.
Even a quick Google search of the hole in the wall would've saved me from this fate, and I felt foolish for blindly trusting the AI's outputs.
Talking to other travellers, I realised I was lucky that the restaurant existed at all, hearing stories of AI tools sending confused tourists to places that were closed or not even real.
Still, I found the tool incredibly helpful while navigating a foreign city, using it not just to find spots to eat but also to translate menus and signs, as well as communicate with locals via voice mode. It felt like the ultimate Asia travel hack.
THE SAME TOURIST SPOTS
Back home in Tokyo, where a weak yen has helped make Japan a top destination for global travellers, I decided to put various AI platforms to the test. I asked DeepSeek, ChatGPT and the agentic tool Manus to create itineraries for someone visiting the city or Japan for the first time.
The results were jam-packed and impressive, but mostly featured all the same tourist spots that you'd find at the top of sites like Tripadvisor.
Some of the recommendations were also a little out of date; ChatGPT advised staying in a traditional inn that has been closed for over a year. And even my request for more off-the-beaten-path locations spit out areas I specifically avoid at peak times, like Shimokitazawa, because of the crowds of tourists.
The outputs made sense given that these tools are an amalgamation of data scraped from the internet. It does save travellers the step of having to scroll through hundreds of websites themselves and put together an itinerary on their own.
But relying on this technology also risks a further homogenisation of travel.
TOURISM WINNERS AND LOSERS BY ALGORITHM
Already, the tech industry is being blamed in tourist hotspots for creating feedback loops that push visitors to the same destinations – with winners and losers chosen by a powerful algorithm.
Given that AI systems are predominantly trained on English-language text, this can also mean that local gems easily slip through the cracks of training data. I can't imagine the late Anthony Bourdain eating pho on a stool anywhere in Vietnam that even had a website.
AI isn't entirely to blame, even if it adds a much larger scale to the issue. Before the rise of these tools, social media was already reshaping travel in Asia – sometimes in bizarre ways.
There's a railroad crossing in my neighbourhood that an influencer posted on Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu and is now constantly inundated with people doing photoshoots. One of my favourite summer swimming spots in the outskirts of the city unexpectedly went viral on TikTok last year, and it was shocking to see how crowded the riverbanks had become with foreigners.
A town near Mt. Fuji garnered international headlines last year after briefly erecting a barrier to block the view of the iconic landmark when it was overrun with tourists trying to all get the same shot – behind a convenience store, of all places.
PUT THE PHONE DOWN
Of course, this isn't limited to Asia. As AI applications proliferate, more people are turning to them to plan vacations from Barcelona to New Orleans. Instead of just advice on local customs, online travel forums have also become popular places to share clever ways to engineer prompts for generative AI tools to make more personalised itineraries.
Still, there are inherent limitations to the data they're trained on. Perhaps it wouldn't hurt to put the phone down and ask a local for their top spots.
Ultimately, AI can break down language and cultural barriers for travellers in ways that seemed unimaginable a decade ago. That's a good thing, and the convenience is undeniable. But it's good to remember that some of the best parts of travel can never be optimised by a machine.