Alike has released new insights into how travellers are using AI to plan holidays. The biggest users of AI travel planning are not solo travellers or digital nomads, but families.
The more significant finding is not the volume of usage. It is the nature of the queries.
Travellers are increasingly sharing the kind of context that would traditionally be reserved for a trusted travel advisor: health concerns, family dynamics, budgets, anxieties, and ideas that are still half-formed.
One traveller asked Eia to plan a Mother’s Day trip for a 59-year-old mother recovering from a hip fracture, with an interest in religious destinations. Another planned a road trip with a partner in her third trimester and wanted advice on routes, stops, and comfort. A parent searching for a summer holiday asked for recommendations where their young children would not have to deal with extreme heat.
“One of the biggest surprises for us has been the level of trust travellers place in Eia,” said Ashish Sidhra, Co-Founder of Alike. “People aren’t treating it like a search engine. They’re sharing personal context, family situations, and health considerations, and asking for recommendations grounded in real life.”
The data reflects this. During May alone, Eia recorded more than 100% growth in query volume. Around 42% of conversations were active trip planning sessions, whilst another 35% were exploratory — travellers still figuring out where they wanted to go.
A growing number of users did not start with a destination at all. They typed “inspire me”, “I want to travel but don’t know where”, or simply “escape from here”. Most returned with sharper, more specific questions, suggesting AI is entering the trip earlier: not at the booking stage, but at the wondering stage.
The findings also show this behaviour is not limited to India.
Without any dedicated campaigns, Eia has seen organic usage emerge in Italian, Korean and Dutch. Italian travellers planned complex multi-city itineraries entirely in Italian. A Korean user planned a Singapore and Bintan trip for elderly parents across an extended back-and-forth with Eia, mapping which attractions to visit by day and time to avoid crowds, with every response adapted around the mother’s back condition. They never had to repeat themselves. Dutch travellers organised European road trips in their native language, with no localisation effort from Alike.
In Delhi, Milan, Seoul and Amsterdam, travellers approached Eia the same way: not as a tool they were testing, but as a planning partner they expected to understand them.
The future of travel planning may not be about searching harder, comparing more options, or opening more tabs. It may be about a system that understands enough context to take a traveller from a half-formed idea to a real trip. When every platform offers AI recommendations, the differentiator is not the information. It is whether the traveller felt understood.
