Funizy Blog

May 14, 2026

Trip Planning Apps All Look the Same Until You Ask the One Question That Separates Them

There are now at least a dozen apps that will generate a multi-day trip itinerary from a text prompt. Most of them look similar in the demo: type a destination and dates, get a day-by-day plan with maps. The differences that matter aren't visible until you ask one specific question. The question is: does this app know anything about what's happening during my specific travel dates? Why This Question Divides the Market Every trip planning app can tell you about permanent attractions. The Colo

By Martin Zokov

May 11, 2026

How to Actually Evaluate an AI Trip Planner

AI trip planners are easy to evaluate badly. You type in a destination, the app generates a polished multi-day itinerary with a map, and it looks impressively useful. What you haven't tested is whether the plan is any good for you, on your dates, with your actual interests — which is the only thing that matters. Most of the differentiation between trip planning tools is invisible in a five-minute trial. Here's how to find it. Test 1: Change the Dates Take the itinerary you just generated and

By Martin Zokov

May 7, 2026

TripAdvisor's AI Itinerary Tool Is Not What You Think It Is

When TripAdvisor launched its AI itinerary planner, the pitch sounded almost unbeatable. The world's largest collection of travel reviews combined with AI should, in theory, produce better travel plans than smaller tools ever could. That assumption makes sense on the surface. In practice, the reality is more complicated. If you've tried TripAdvisor's AI trip planner and felt strangely underwhelmed by the results, the issue usually is not that the recommendations are bad. It's that the tool is

By Martin Zokov

May 7, 2026

Why AI Trip Plans Feel Generic Even When You Tell the AI Your Preferences

You tell the AI you're interested in street food, local music, and avoiding tourist crowds. It produces an itinerary that includes the city's most-reviewed food market, a famous live music venue that appears on every "best of" list, and a neighborhood that every guide book describes as "off the beaten path" while recommending it to hundreds of thousands of readers. This is a specific failure mode of current AI trip planning, and it's not a bug in the traditional sense. It's a predictable conseq

By Martin Zokov

May 4, 2026

The Wrong Question Most Travelers Ask Before a Trip (And a Better One)

"What should I do in [city]?" is the default question travelers ask when planning a trip. It gets typed into search engines millions of times a day. It prompts guidebook chapters, travel blog posts, and AI itineraries. It is, in almost every case, the wrong question. Not because it's unhelpful — the results are often technically accurate and sometimes genuinely good. But because it's asking the city to define your experience of it, rather than asking yourself what kind of experience you want.

By Martin Zokov

Apr 30, 2026

Planning a Trip When You Have Strong Preferences

Most travel planning advice is written for people who are relatively easygoing about what they want from a trip. "Just explore!" "Leave room for spontaneity!" "The best discoveries happen by accident!" That advice is useless if you're someone with specific, non-negotiable preferences. If you hate crowds, actively dislike museums, need live music the way other people need sightseeing, or plan your trips around food to a degree that other travelers find slightly alarming — the standard approach o

By Martin Zokov

Apr 25, 2026

Your Trips Are Boring and It’s Your Fault Again

Let’s be honest for a second. If your last few trips felt a bit underwhelming, it’s probably not because you picked the wrong destinations. It’s because you planned them the exact same way you always do, which is also how most people plan. You choose a city first, you open a few “things to do” articles, you bookmark some landmarks, maybe add a restaurant or two, and you book a hotel somewhere central so everything is “convenient.” On paper, that sounds perfectly reasonable. In reality, it almost

By Martin Zokov

Apr 23, 2026

Why Destination-First Trips Fail Travelers With Strong Interests

You've decided to go to Lisbon. You open a browser and type "things to do in Lisbon." You get the same 15 results: LX Factory, Belém Tower, Time Out Market, Sintra day trip. You book the trip. You come home and describe it as "fine." The city was beautiful, but you spent three days doing things curated for a hypothetical average tourist, not for you. This is the failure mode of destination-first trip planning — and it's the default setting of almost every travel tool, guidebook, and AI planner

By Martin Zokov

Apr 21, 2026

You’re Planning Trips Wrong and It’s Costing You

Most people plan trips the same way. They pick a destination first, lock in dates, and only then start thinking about what they actually want to do. It feels logical. It’s also why so many people end up overpaying and coming back from trips that feel underwhelming. If you’ve ever built a trip like this, you’ve probably experienced the same pattern. You spend more than expected, rush through activities, and still feel like you missed something. Tools like Funizy exist to flip that process, but

By Martin Zokov

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