[Study] AI is making travel planning feel easier… “but also more samey”

There is a new moment most travellers will recognise. You open an AI tool, type in a question like “Where should I go for a week in October?” or “Best places for a luxury break”, and within seconds you are given a tidy answer. A shortlist. A plan. A sense that the hard part of travel planning has been done for you.

For anyone who has ever spent hours hopping between blogs, Reddit threads, booking sites, and group chats, it can feel like a small miracle. The internet used to overwhelm you with choice. AI now offers something different. It tries to remove the noise.

The catch is that, in doing so, it can also shrink the world.

We analysed how often countries and cities were mentioned across thousands of AI travel responses, split into three types of travel intent: general travel planning, luxury travel, and solo travel. What emerged was not just a list of popular places. It was a pattern. AI recommendations are not evenly spread across the map. They tend to concentrate around a small set of repeat destinations, and that concentration becomes even stronger when the intent becomes more specific.

If you are a consumer planning a holiday, this matters more than it might sound at first.

Why AI keeps recommending the same places

AI tools are designed to be useful quickly. They are not trying to simulate every possibility, or offer you the full range of options the way a search engine does. Their job is to give you an answer that feels safe, sensible, and easy to act on.

That usually means recommending destinations that are well-known, well-documented, and easy to justify. Places with endless itinerary guides, plenty of hotel options, clear transport links, and lots of familiar “proof” online. The more widely a destination is described in simple, repeatable language, the easier it is for AI to present it as a confident recommendation.

This does not mean the AI is lying (or hallucinating), or that these places are bad choices. It means the AI is biased towards destinations that are easy to talk about.

What the travel world looks like through AI

When we looked at Google’s AI responses for 80,000 holiday planning questions,  the most frequently cited countries were Canada, the United Kingdom, Mexico, the United States, India, Australia, France, Singapore, Jamaica, and the Bahamas.

These are major travel markets and major tourism brands, but they are also places with huge visibility across travel content and mainstream narratives.

Luxury travel produced a slightly different map. India, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Maldives, Singapore, Australia, Japan, Canada, France, and Thailand rose to the top. Luxury recommendations tended to favour destinations that carry premium associations, or that fit neatly into a “high-end” story that an AI can describe without hesitation.

Solo travel narrowed the map again. Japan, Thailand, Portugal, Costa Rica, Iceland, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, India, and Vietnam were the most frequently mentioned. Here, the common theme was reassurance. These are destinations that are perceived as safe, navigable, and rewarding to explore independently, with enough online guidance to make a solo trip feel manageable.

In other words, the more a traveller’s question implies risk, uncertainty, or complexity, the more selective AI tends to become.

What this means for your holiday planning

If you use AI to help plan travel, you may start to notice a subtle shift in the way decisions form.

The first is repetition. When the same countries appear again and again, they begin to feel like the obvious choices, even if they would not have been the choices you landed on without the prompt. Over time, that repetition shapes what feels “popular” and what feels “worth it”. You might not even realise the shortlist is narrowing, because the recommendations are still plausible, still attractive, and still full of things you would genuinely enjoy.

The second is early closure. One of the best parts of travel planning is the sense of discovery, the rabbit hole that leads from one idea to another. AI does not encourage that kind of wandering. It tends to present its answer as complete.

That can save time, but it can also end the exploration phase earlier than you intended, and that is often where the most surprising trips begin.

The third is sameness. AI is excellent at producing a polished itinerary, but that itinerary is often built from the same ingredients: the same landmarks, the same neighbourhoods, the same “must-dos”. If you follow it closely, your holiday can start to look like everyone else’s holiday, not because you lack imagination, but because AI has optimised the journey for familiarity.

There is also a quieter effect. When AI nudges more travellers towards the same places, those places can become more crowded, more expensive, and harder to enjoy in the way people imagined. That does not happen overnight, but it is not difficult to see how recommendation systems can steer demand, especially when they become part of how people plan by default.

How to use AI without letting it choose for you

The best way to treat AI is as a brilliant assistant, not a decision maker.

It is perfect for the tedious parts of planning. Routes, timings, airport transfers, day-by-day pacing, what to pack, how to structure a week so you are not exhausted by day three. It is also useful when you already know the destination and want help organising the trip around your preferences.

Where you should be more careful is the moment it offers the first shortlist, because that is the moment your options start to narrow.

If you want to keep the world wide, you can push the AI to behave differently.

Ask it for alternatives that match your taste, not just the “best” places overall. Ask for quieter versions of the same type of trip, or cheaper equivalents, or destinations that feel similar but are less crowded. Ask it to include smaller towns, not just the obvious capitals. Ask it to give you twenty options rather than five.

These are small changes in the way you ask, but they can change the map that comes back.