If you love vacation but hate planning, creating an itinerary and booking hotels, meals, and activities can put a damper on your trip before it even starts. Maybe you don't know where to start to look for recommendations, or you get overwhelmed by the sheer number of options to choose from.

If a travel agent is a little out of reach, financially speaking, you may want to try Mindtrip.ai, a chat-based travel planning tool. It's currently in beta, but it will put together trip itineraries with specific recommendations based on a prompt, question, or uploaded media—and you can see detailed hours, prices, locations, and reviews and click through to book directly when you're ready. The tool also has a "travel persona" quiz to inform its recommendations. You don't need an account to use Mindtrip, but you may want to create one (it's free) to keep track of all of your chats and itineraries.

How to plan a vacation with Mindtrip

The simplest way to get started with Mindtrip is to head to the homepage and start chatting. You can enter something as simple as a destination, or give it a very specific prompt (ie., "I want to visit Japan to see the cherry blossoms and go on a culinary tour"). The chatbot can also pull information from links to social media posts (though this didn't work for every piece of content I tried) or voice prompts.

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When I asked the chatbot to help plan a trip to Japan, it returned a five-day itinerary with specific sights, restaurants, and hotels as well as transportation recommendations. Each suggestion is clickable, which pops up a Google-like listing, including photos, reviews, and a map. Hotel suggestions show specific room types with rates and photos, while restaurant listings show similar suggestions nearby. City listings come with pros and cons as well as seasonal weather summaries. You can favorite recommendations if you want to build a different itinerary later.

Credit: Emily Long

You can continue to build or refine the itinerary by giving the chatbot additional prompts or questions. If you create an account, you can see your chats and saved itineraries by opening the left-hand menu bar. Mindtrip also has a travel persona feature, which asks you a bunch of prompts about what kind of travel you like to inform its recommendations.

I also used the chatbot to put together a trip for my hometown to see if its suggestions were ones I would also recommend, and for the most part they were. At the very least, this gives you a starting point that you can build on.