Let’s be honest—there’s no shortage of AI tools claiming to simplify travel planning. We’ve tried many ourselves, and frankly, none of them feel like they’ve truly cracked the code, especially when it comes to group work trips.

In this post, we’ll take you behind the scenes of our latest major product release, exploring how Finch is approaching AI-assisted travel planning today and where we’re headed. 

Interested in chatting about this? Reach out to schedule a chat about how you travel for work, and how we might be able to help.

The problem with current AI trip planners

If you’ve dabbled with tools like ChatGPT or the slew of other travel-specific AI options, you’ve probably noticed a common journey: Enter or build a prompt, get a day-by-day itinerary. It’s a great starting point, cutting down the time spent scouring endless travel blogs and websites. 

But let’s be real—these tools often spit out a static, text-based itinerary that, while helpful, still leaves the heavy lifting on your shoulders.

Other AI planners give you a head start, but they don’t eliminate the manual work involved in turning an itinerary into a real trip—all the hard, messy aspects of planning and coordination still fall on you. And because they lack the context of who you are or who’s in your group, the suggestions can be pretty hit-or-miss.

Every trip is unique, and so is every traveller. When it comes to planning for a group, with everyone’s diverse needs, preferences, and constraints, broad-purpose AI models just don’t cut it. They treat all travel scenarios the same, offering generic solutions that often miss the mark.

Your personal AI travel assistant

With our latest release, we’ve launched Finch Assist, starting with the Trip Builder assistant. Its primary aim is to make your planning experience more efficient. To give you an idea of what’s possible today, here are few things you can try out—

• Outsource Manual Effort: Nearly everything you can do manually can now be done through simple prompts.

• Process Bookings Seamlessly: Forward your confirmation emails to plans@bookings.finch.travel, and watch Finch Assist build them into your itinerary.

• Context-Aware Assistance: Finch Assist knows about your trips—past, present, and future. Need to recall details from an upcoming trip or duplicate a past one? It’s got you covered.

• Group-Centric Planning: Finch Assist understands the people on your trip and those you’ve travelled with before. As we build out traveller profiles, it’ll get even better at catering to everyone’s preferences and constraints.

• Search the Web: It can fetch trip ideas, transit, and lodging options, and even build complex cost models based on multiple scenarios.

As we continue to release new functionality, Assist will grow and learn new tools. Whether that’s generating estimated costs on every component of your trip, or bulk enabling calendar sync on your full group’s itinerary. We’re excited to see where we can take this, and hope it strikes a chord with you.

We want every one of our early adopters to experience real value from Finch Assist without limitations. That’s why we’re still offering Finch for free, and will continue to do so for as long as we can.

What’s next for Finch Assist?

Our vision includes a team of hyper-trained AI travel assistants to help with various aspects of trip planning. We’re not pursuing AI just to follow trends—we’re incorporating it to solve customer problems faster and more comprehensively.

What aspects of trip planning would you like to outsource? What challenges related to travel could transform your company if solved? We want to learn from you as we determine how Finch Assist could bring you the most value.

Give Finch Assist a try by logging in at www.finch.travel. We can’t wait to hear your feedback.

Happy planning!