I have so much going on right now that I’m glad I have an agentic bot doing all my summer travel planning. I’ve shared a preliminary template here but I went ahead and decided to stay in Europe for the summer and into the fall returning in October. The key problem however is that a US passport only gets you 90 days in Schengen Europe then you have to leave for 90 days.
I asked my AI bot to create a 97 day Europe continent trip but leave a gap of days so I don’t exceed the 90 day limit. It picked two non-Schengen countries for me to burn 60 days in complete with full itineraries for every day including museums, Michelin restaurants, massage spas, UNESCO sites, cooking classes and other activities.
I did an amazing job but did make stupid mistakes. I asked it to add a column to my planning spreadsheet to keep track of Schengen and non-Schengen days but it couldn’t do simple math and kept miscounting the days.
At one point it mixed up the activities from one country, Italy, with another, Albania. I pointed out the error and it fixed everything of course. I often wonder if it is making this mistakes so it has something to do because it is always eager to do more and help out. It’s not entirely AI’s fault, I kept changing the itinerary around because I initially wanted to go from east to west but then decided I wanted to go east to south then west then east.
The Cost
How much did all this planning cost? A whopping $4.72 using DeepSeek. I switched all my AI models from Claude and ChatGPT for China AI models, it simply makes economic sense. Claude may be the best AI but who wants to pay $50 for a trip plan?
Considering that I would have spent at least 4 hours or longer researching activities to do in 11 countries complete with hotels, dinning, flights, activities and other stuff, and another 2 hours putting everything into a spreadsheet, the $5 is a no-brainer. AI also created professional looking spreadsheet but I plan on having it create a portable HTML document I can open on my cell phone and laptop computer.
You can see my transition away from ChatGPT and Claude on this graph. The box shows $4.72 spend on the full travel itinerary for 11 countries and 97 days.
AI is incredible if you know how to use it right and have low cost agentic bots doing the work for you.
The Future Is Awesome And Bleak
Take some time to re-read my post. AI did my entire plan. It did not book my flights, hotels or other activities because I prefer to do that myself but carefully consider all the intermediary players that I avoided. All the travel websites (with ads) that I skipped, all the restaurant review places like Yelp and their associated ads, and everything else that I didn’t have to bother with on planning this trip.
Also consider that the only thing I really needed was an interface to talk to my ai agent. I did that with my laptop but if I had a simple device I could carry around in my pocket the size of an iPod mini, why would I ever need a smartphone or laptop ever again? Why would I need “apps” if agentic bots can go out and do everything for me? Why would I pay $1500 for an iPhone who has only one app that I will need: “Talk to AI bot.”
At some point in the future, laptops and smartphone devices will become obsolete at least in their present form and cost structure. I give it 5 years or less.
Share The Wealth
Have you installed hermes agent yet? What the heck are you waiting for?