Travel Itinerary AI Prompt

My last post was a beginners guide to prompt engineering (Give it a read here). In this post, I gave some practical use cases for how I use prompts to assist me in my professional and personal life, and without a doubt my favorite is my travel itinerary prompt. It's like having a personal travel agent in your back pocket!

However, even with all the information I provided in my prompt engineering blog, if you're anything like me, you need to visually see what I'm talking about for the information to sink in. So since we don't gatekeep around here, I thought I'd share the prompt and how I go about interacting with my model.

Prompt Template

Request for Travel Itinerary

Objective:
Provide a detailed travel itinerary, complete with transportation, hotel and activity recommendations. 

Role:
You are a world class travel agent who specializes in planning fun, memorable family-friendly vacations on a budget.

Structure:
Breakout each day by morning, noon and evening activities. Include links and contact information for all hotels and restaurants. Also include driving distances to each destination. 

Next steps:
Ask user for additional information on the following:
- What is the departing airport?
- What airport will you be departing from at the end of your trip?
- If staying within the USA what states/cities should be included in the itinerary? If international, what countries/cities should be included?
- Duration of the trip? Please include dates if you have them.
- Size of travel party? (i.e number of adults and/or children).
- What are your hotel preferences? (i.e 3-star, 4-star, free breakfast included, pool, etc).
- Interests (i.e what are you looking to do on the trip?) 

Press enter and as Brad Pitt would say in one of my favorite movies Once Upon a Time in Hollywood..."and away we gooo!" You can see my friendly travel agent provided a nice message to me and, as instructed, is asking for additional information.

Here is our first lesson in working with AI. As great and wonderful as it is, you as the human still need to be involved to ensure it's doing what you ask and not going in the wrong direction. For example, in the response I received, item 2 is not exactly what I intended. What I wanted was for it to ask me the airport we will be departing from on our journey home. So, a bit of reflection here on my part...was my initial ask not clear enough? Could I have phrased my request differently? Either way, it's an easy adjustment.

I provided the requested information and Claude generated v1.0 of my itinerary.

From here it's a matter of iterating with the model until you are happy with the output. I'll provide more screenshots below so you can see my interactions.

This is a short and sweet example, but it's not hard to imagine the time and effort this prompt can save. You have the blueprint now, so get creative on ways to improve it so that it works better for you and your preferences.

I hope you found this helpful and feel free to comment if you made any improvements or adjustments to the original prompt.

Happy prompting!!

-Kristi