Planning a 12-day itinerary for an international honeymoon is not for the faint of heart.
So, when I learned about Mindtrip — an AI-powered travel planning website that promises to deliver personalized experiences complete with photos, reviews, and maps — I had high hopes it could make the process easier for me.
After using it to plan my Australian honeymoon, I found it was a good starting point, but there was plenty of room for improvement.
The platform was helpful for keeping things organized
To start planning my trip, I opened a new chat where I was prompted to “ask anything.”
I asked the AI chat function to create an itinerary for our trip to Australia, and shared our flight information, the hotels we had booked, and a few activities we’d already had planned.
From there, Mindtrip began building out our trip within the chat. It created an itinerary, calendar, and list of bookings I’d already made.
The trip itinerary was my favorite function, as it was helpful to see all our plans in one place, listed chronologically. I input a lot of our plans manually, but also used the chat to add items.
However, I had a few instances where the itinerary didn’t update correctly, leaving out activities or reservation details I’d listed.
I probably could’ve created a similar itinerary in a spreadsheet or Google doc, but it was nice to have website links and information about each activity — like photos, ratings, and a summary — all in the same place.
Another aspect I enjoyed was that Mindtrip allows you to add other people to your trip.
This made it easy for my husband to access the plans and make changes to the itinerary. It was also helpful for staying on the same page throughout our honeymoon.
I think this feature could be great for those planning group trips remotely, such as bachelorette trips or family vacations.
However, Mindtrip wasn’t as good at providing personalized recommendations
In addition to the organization features, Mindtrip is designed to provide personalized recommendations for things like restaurants, museums, activities, and hotels. It does this by analyzing a quiz you submit through the chat.
However, there were a few times the platform seemed to glitch and not have access to my quiz responses. Other times, it suggested things that were already on my itinerary, which I found to be frustrating.
When the tool did work — or, when I directly asked for recommendations in the chat — I didn’t think the responses felt very personalized.
For example, it recommended many of the same five restaurants to me over and over, while missing other great options I found with my own research later.
When reached for comment, a representative for Mindtrip explained that the duplicate suggestions may have been due to a glitch in the system, which has since been resolved.
The representative also said the company is “continuing to work on ways to incorporate more personalization into the chat experience with or without the quiz.”
The platform was a helpful starting point, but I wouldn’t rely on it to plan everything
Although I found the platform to be fun to use and somewhat helpful, I’d consider it a starting point for planning a trip.
During my planning process, I still referred to travel news sites for hotel recommendations, searched for restaurants on Google, and found influencer recommendations on TikTok and Instagram to build out my itinerary.
To use Mindtrip to its fullest capacity, I think you have to dedicate a lot of time to inputting and perfecting your itinerary. I could see a Google doc being just as effective — just without the aesthetic benefit of Mindtrip’s layout.
I also think it would be nice for the platform to have an app, which would make using the itinerary in real time much more user-friendly.
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