Not long ago, a group of anthropologists were climbing the Inca Trail, the legendary hike through the cloud forests of the Andes Mountains that concludes at Machu Picchu’s Sun Gate. Along the way, they swapped supposedly local stories about the region’s lore. Overhearing them, their trail guide was puzzled.
“[They] were telling each other these ancient tales, stories that I had never heard as a local,” says Miguel Angel Gongora Meza, founder and director of Evolution Treks Peru. A native Peruvian, he knows the region well as a professional guide for three decades. “So, I asked where they got those stories. They said, ‘AI!’ I tried to research them but couldn’t find anything about them. No wonder they sound so fabulous; they’re not true!”
As survey after survey finds a sizable minority of travelers turning to chatbots for critical trip information, professional guides are finding themselves fact-checking a torrent of travel slop, from false facts about a place to fake places entirely. In September, for instance, Gongora Meza told the BBC about two tourists he’d stopped before they set off on a “perilous” trek to the “Sacred Canyon of Humantay,” a destination that doesn’t exist.
If you similarly find yourself somewhere new, what travel tech can you actually trust to help you get to know a place? It’s a question travelers ask with greater frequency, as AI gets integrated into virtually every device and app you use on the go—like Gemini in Google Maps or an upgraded Siri “Visual Intelligence” feature coming to Apple’s iPhone camera with iOS 27, out this September. And a new wave of wearables makes clear Big Tech’s vision goes even further: cameras on glasses and cameras in future AirPods; glasses with augmented reality navigation; and real-time translation beamed into our ears.
But as new AI features launch there’s a counter trend emerging that’s inspiring a more intentional, utility-first relationship with tech: think a new wave of “digital detox” devices—smarter than your average “dumbphone” capable only of texting and calling—and the resurgence of single-purpose gear that helps us log off and, well, connect. Below, we look at some of the ways technology is changing the way we travel.
Planning: You can now chat with the map, but should you?
The kind of misinformation guides like Gongora Meza find themselves increasingly needing to correct is par for the course with large language models, the kind of tech many people refer to when they say “AI” and “chatbots.” “Chatbot outputs are not based off of a database of facts. They are based on the next best guess of the words which come before it, based on existing training data, typically scraped from the web,” explains Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR).
This can quickly get problematic when relied on for planning a trip to destinations underrepresented in the data. “If the training data set has 1,000 articles of ‘Best 10 things to do in New York,’ that will likely be more accurate than ‘What are 10 things which are off the beaten path in Peru,’” she explains. “Chatbots make things up and then they might happen to be correct.”
Even so, tech companies are changing their apps and mobile operating systems around to nudge more travelers to use AI on our existing devices. “Whole interfaces have changed where it’s designed around [AI]. It’s just everywhere,” says Julian Chokkattu, senior editor covering gear at Wired. “A lot of this is just largely changing the way we interact with our phones.”