Is this the end of the 20-tab holiday?

Planning a holiday used to mean lugging around a guidebook, a map, and perhaps calling a travel agent. Today, it can look more like an exercise in digital endurance. There is a tab for flights, another for hotels, one for trains and several more for restaurants and attractions. A friend has sent a list of recommendations on Messenger, Instagram has supplied a few more, and your phone is quietly filling with screenshots that seemed important enough to save at the time. Before the suitcase is even out of the closet, you may already have a spreadsheet keeping everything together.

It is one of the strange side effects of having the world at our fingertips. Travel has never been easier to research, compare, and book, yet the sheer amount of information available can make deciding what to do surprisingly difficult. Discussions on Reddit’s r/travelplanning about having 15 or more tabs open for a single trip struck a familiar chord: the modern traveller has access to almost everything, but is often left to do the gruelling job of putting it all together.

These days, the problem has shifted increasingly and is no longer about finding information but making sense of it.

That is where technical innovations are beginning to change travel planning. Instead of simply giving travellers more search results, artificial intelligence (AI) can help interpret what they actually want and connect the dots between different decisions. A trip is rarely about finding a hotel, a flight or a restaurant in isolation. It is about finding a hotel that makes sense for the places you want to visit, a flight that fits the rest of the journey and budget, and activities that can realistically coexist in the same day.

AI-powered travel planning

This is the opportunity Trip.com is pursuing as it incorporates AI into its travel ecosystem. The idea is to move beyond the traditional booking experience and make technology more useful and responsive throughout the planning process, helping travellers go from a vague idea of a holiday to a plan that actually works.

Trip.com’s TripGenie, its AI-powered travel assistant, is designed to help users research destinations, ask questions, receive personalized recommendations and build itineraries using text or voice. Instead of treating every search as a separate transaction, the tool can work with the context of the trip and help narrow down the possibilities.

While this may not sound like a significant change, it reflects a much bigger shift from “what is available?” to “what makes sense for me?” That distinction matters because travellers are not really looking for more choices. They are looking for the right choices. A family travelling with children, a couple chasing good food, and a solo traveller who prefers to wander without a schedule can visit the same city and want vastly different experiences out of their trip.

Of course, seasoned travel planners understand that choosing what to do is only half the battle. The other half is making sure everything fits together without requiring military-level logistics.

A city may appear compact on a screen but may surprisingly involve an hour-long train ride between two attractions. A restaurant may be highly recommended but sit nowhere near the museum you planned to visit beforehand. Then there are opening hours, traffic, weather, and the unavoidable fact that humans eventually get tired.

Trip.com’s Trip.Planner addresses this more practical side of travel planning by helping travellers turn their preferences and destination research into a day-by-day itinerary equipped with a map. It can bring attractions, routes, transportation and existing bookings into one plan, while allowing travellers to edit and adjust the itinerary as they go.

That flexibility may be more useful than a supposedly perfect itinerary. Because the perfect itinerary usually lasts until the first delayed train, unexpected downpour or restaurant queue. The best plans leave room for reality, and perhaps for the occasional decision to abandon the schedule entirely in favor of sitting in a café and calling it a day.

A pocket travel companion

The smartphone has already become the modern traveller’s most important tool. These days it can carry boarding passes, maps, hotel confirmations, restaurant reservations, translation tools and enough photos and videos to prove that you were, in fact, there.

The next step is making all that information work together to make planning easier for the traveller. This is where having Trip.com’s broader ecosystem in one’s smartphone becomes important. Rather than treating flights, hotels, transport and itinerary planning as entirely separate experiences, the platform connects booking with AI-assisted discovery and planning. TripGenie can help travellers explore possibilities and build plans, while Trip.Planner can help organise those plans around actual routes and bookings.

But sometimes, the hardest part is knowing where to begin. With seemingly endless options of hotels, restaurants, and sights to visit, travellers can spend just as much time deciding between options as they do actually planning the trip. Trip.com’s Trip.Best is designed to cut through some of that noise by bringing together rankings of top travel options around the world, helping travellers discover highly regarded places without having to sift through page after page of search results.

Trip.Best organizes these recommendations across categories that reflect different ways people travel. Under “Stays,” for instance, one can explore various rankings and categories of hotels, restaurants, and activities to try. These are part of Trip.com’s 2026 Global 100 rankings, which cover hotels, attractions, nightlife, restaurants, and destinations. The rankings draw on customer reviews, year-round sales data, consistent quality, and themed categories, giving travellers another starting point for discovering what a destination has to offer.

Having Trip.com’s phone app means less planning friction: fewer searches to repeat, fewer details to remember, and fewer moments of scrolling through an inbox trying to find the confirmation you know you received somewhere. More importantly, it brings discovery, inspiration, and planning closer so that one can go from finding a destination to discovering what is worth seeing and doing, to building an unforgettable trip around those choices. For a traveller, that can mean less time managing the trip and more time actually experiencing it.

There is, of course, a limit to how much we should ask technology to do.

Part of the pleasure of travel is that it does not always go according to plan. The best meal may be the one you did not research. The most memorable street may be the one you wandered into by accident. The attraction you expected to love might be disappointing, while the place you almost skipped becomes the highlight of the trip. AI cannot and should not take those decisions away.

Its more interesting role is to handle some of the complexity surrounding them. It can help narrow down choices, connect information, suggest routes, and make a plan easier and less stressful to change on the fly. The traveller remains the one making the decisions, with technology doing some of the background work.

That is perhaps the most promising direction for AI in travel: not a machine that plans the perfect holiday for you, but one that understands enough about the journey to make planning require less work.

So, is this the end of the 20-tab holiday?

Well, there will always be the traveller who will want to compare one last hotel “just to be sure,” the friend who sends a restaurant recommendation at midnight, and the inevitable screenshot whose purpose nobody can remember. But the way we manage all that information is changing.

AI is beginning to turn travel planning from an exercise in searching and sorting into something more conversational and personalised. And for platforms like Trip.com, that means the future is no longer just about helping travellers book a journey. It is about helping them make sense of the journey before they even leave home. Which, after all, is what good technology should do.

So the next time you find yourself planning your next trip with 20 tabs open, a half-finished itinerary, and a phone full of screenshots, remember that there may be a simpler way. Open Trip.com, tell TripGenie where you want to go, what kind of trip you have in mind, and let AI help turn the possibilities into a concrete plan.

Because your next adventure should involve choosing where to go; not breaking a sweat searching for details of your itinerary in the 20 tabs you have open.

INQUIRER.net BrandRoom/KC