What Happened to Google's AI Trip Planner? 

Google is still adding AI tools that can help with travel, but a dedicated trip planner expected last summer is no longer on the roadmap, a Google spokesperson told Skift.

The tech giant showcased the trip planner during its annual developer conference in May 2024, and said it would be coming to Gemini Advanced that summer. Gemini Advanced is the paid version of the Gemini AI search engine, which the company released in March 2023 as a competitor to ChatGPT.

The trip planner is still on the group’s list of potential projects, but there’s no longer an official launch date, said the spokesperson. Regardless, it likely would be an evolved version from what was showcased almost a year ago. 

The trip planner was meant to create a personalized itinerary, taking into account details like flight landing times that the AI would pull from a connected Gmail account. The itinerary would then be presented in an interface that would allow the user to change times and make other adjustments.

During the livestream last May, Sissie Hsiao, vice president of Google and general manager for Gemini experiences, said: "This new trip planning experience will be rolling out to Gemini Advanced this summer, just in time to help you plan your own Labor Day weekend.” 

The Google spokesperson said travel is among users’ favorite topics, and so that area is still a major focus. 

The tech is advancing quickly, and priorities can shift quickly. The company is continually testing different tools and taking feedback from users, which also influences the direction their focus takes, the spokesperson said.

What Google Has Done Lately with Generative AI 

Google last week rolled out new features on Gemini that it said could help travelers during trip planning. It’s part of the company’s goal to push Gemini as a “personal, AI-powered assistant."

Google said that Gemini now connects with a user’s Google apps and services, starting with traditional Search, meant to generate more personalized results.

“For example, you can ask Gemini for restaurant recommendations and it will reference your recent food-related searches, or ask for travel advice and Gemini will respond based on destinations you've previously searched,” the company said in a blog post last week.

Google last week said that Gemini can connect to several apps — Calendar, Notes, Tasks, and Photos — when using a more advanced “thinking model,” meant to allow the chatbot to answer more complex prompts. “For example, Gemini can look at photos from your recent trip and create a travel itinerary based on the places you visited,” Google said in a blog post. 

The company also said last week that it opened its Gems tools to free Gemini users. It had only been open to Gemini Advanced users. The Gems tools allows users to create chatbots within Gemini that are dedicated to chatting about a specific topic, like an upcoming trip.

Aside from the Gemini AI search engine, Google has been experimenting with integrated generative AI into traditional search. Since 2024, an AI-generated summary called AI Overviews has appeared at the top of some search results. The company earlier this month began publicly testing AI Mode as an expansion of that tool. AI Mode is shown as a tab in search results alongside the other tabs, like Images.