AI Supported Travel Planner
Personal Exploration Project
Role: Service Design | UX Design
2024
This project originated as a team initiative where we were exploring how AI could assist users in planning trips through their insurance plans. I was responsible for creating early UI flows and helping define the user experience. However, the project was deprioritized due to a shift in company focus.
I chose to continue developing the concept on my own as a personal project, using it as a sandbox to apply service design thinking, conversational UI patterns, and dynamic content generation.
- What did I want to achieve?
- - Learn how AI can be used for meaningful user decision support
- - Design for multi-step personalization flows (budget, preferences, destinations)
- - Challenge myself in blending logic, emotion, and service continuity in a single product experience
- Understanding the Problem
The initial brief was to explore how an AI-powered app could help users plan personalized trips, with the unique twist of integrating insurance plan benefits into the planning experience. Users needed to dynamically filter destinations, activities, and budgets while receiving safety alerts, weather conditions, and optimized itineraries.
Research
Prior to joining the team, the stake holder interviews, research on planning habits, and persona development was completed. The persona below is based on a combination of that data and surveys I conducted for this exploration.
A review of four travel tools (Hopper, GuideGeek, Wonderplan, and iPlan.ai) was conducted to get insight in how AI is being use in other travel applications.
Persona
AI Tool Comparison
Key Insights
Many users were unaware they could use insurance for travel benefits.
Most users found trip planning overwhelming and time-consuming.
Personalization and transparency were highly valued.
Users want to be able to stay on budget without sacrificing quality of the trip.
Service Design
To visualize touch points and support systems, I created a Service Blueprint that aligned:
- Frontstage elements
- AI chatbot, UI, itinerary results
- Backstage processes
- data sourcing, insurance plan parsing, itinerary generation
UX Design
I set out to design an end-to-end travel experience that begins with initial awareness of the tool—through the app and social media—and extends all the way to post-trip follow-up, where we gather feedback on the user’s overall travel experience.
The AI-powered Travel Assistant guides users through typical trip planning questions, offering multiple ways to respond: selecting from AI-generated suggestions, typing, or speaking. Each trip is curated based on user input and results in a personalized experience that includes a title, 3–5 destination options, quick destination facts, a day-by-day itinerary, and transportation choices. Because the service is linked to an insurance provider, users also see relevant policy bonuses and discounts integrated directly into the booking flow.
To ensure flexibility, the platform supports multiple payment options and scheduled payments. Users receive timely notifications through the app about both trip details and upcoming payments. During and after their travels, they can easily review and share feedback on each experience, creating a continuous loop of engagement.
