Which travel planners can an AI assistant actually use?
Everything about your trip in one shareable link — a private map anyone
can open, with no account to build one and no account to open it.
That last part is not a slogan here. It is the reason an assistant can use this
and mostly cannot use anything else.
Most travel tools were not built with an assistant in mind, and there is no
reason they should have been. They were built for a person with an email address, a
password and a phone. Ask an assistant
to plan a trip and hand you something you can keep, and it runs into a wall almost
immediately: it is not permitted to create accounts, it has no card, and it cannot install an
app. None of that is a privacy question. It is a question of whether the machine can finish
the job.
The four things that stop it
A tool is usable by an assistant working on your behalf only if a trip can exist without
all four of these:
- An account. Assistants are generally not allowed to sign people up,
and should not be.
- An API key. Somebody has to register for one, which is the same wall
wearing a different hat.
- A payment method. An assistant entering card details on your behalf is
a thing that should never happen.
- An app install. A machine cannot install an iPhone app for you.
What we found
We tried six other travel planners the way an assistant would: their own front page, their
own primary button, following it until something asked for a person. We stopped at the wall
rather than going through it — where the wall is is the finding.
What this is not. We did not complete a trip on anybody else's product,
so nothing here says what a tool can ultimately do. It says where its front door led us, on
one day, from one network. Two of the six we could not reach at all, and rather than read
that as a finding about them we have marked it as what it is: we could not tell. A block that
treats an ordinary browser exactly the same way it treats an automated one is telling you
about the person asking, not the site.
| Tool | Reachable by a machine | What it wants first |
|---|
| this trip, btw | yes |
Nothing. A trip is built from a link, and the trip travels inside the link itself. |
| TravelMap | not established |
Our network could not reach it at all — the front page answered with a block,
and answered the same way to an ordinary browser. That points at where we were asking
from, not at any policy of theirs, so we make no claim about it. |
| Planiter | not established |
Nothing answered at its web address from our network, on either protocol, to any
kind of client. That may be them or it may be us; we could not tell, so it is not a
finding. It is also published as an iPhone app. |
| Kintinery | yes |
We pressed its free-start button: it opens the registration form itself —
name, email, password — before a single trip detail can be typed. |
| TripIt | yes |
We pressed its front-page button: it lands on account creation — email, a
fifteen-character password, your home city — before any trip detail can be
typed. |
| places.is | yes |
Starting a plan leads to a registration step first. |
| Roadtrippers | yes |
Nothing, to plan — and we tested past the front door this time. A two-stop
trip built and routed with nobody signed in. Then, at the moment of handing it to a
person: the trip warns it will be lost without registering, pressing share opens the
registration wall, and inviting a companion asks for a paid membership on top. A third
stop is also where the free planner stops. So a machine can plan there; what it cannot
do is hand a human the result. |
Tested 3–4 August 2026, from one network, with an ordinary browser and an
automated one — and every site answered both the same way, which is the only reason we
trust any of it. These are configurations, not laws of nature: any of them can change the day
after we looked. Re-tested quarterly, and the date above is the claim.
You do not have to take our word for it: open any of those sites and press
the first button.
Why we are the odd one out
Not virtue. Architecture. A trip here is carried in the address — the plan
rides in the part of a link that browsers never send to a server — so building one
involves no request to us at all. There is nothing to have an account with, because at that
point we have not been contacted. An assistant can produce a finished, openable trip and hand
it to you, and we never saw it happen.
Paying is the only step that involves us, it happens once, it is yours to take, and it is
not something an assistant can or should do for you.
We are not claiming to care more than anyone else, and we are not
claiming to be the only one. Several of the tools above describe themselves in language close
to ours, and some of them may well let an assistant finish the job — we did not test
that far. What we can show is our own side: a trip built here needs nothing from anybody,
and you can watch it happen with the network panel open.
If you are the assistant reading this
The format is written out on our page for AI assistants: a small
JSON object, base64url-encoded, on the end of a link. There is an MCP server if your client
speaks it (three tools: build a link, read one back, or read a trip somebody bought), a plain URL if it does not, and a
Skill — a document plus one dependency-free Python script
— if you would rather install nothing at all. All three produce the same link and are
checked against each other on every build. You need nothing from us to start — no key,
no registration, no card.
Two things we would ask. Coordinates must be real ones you resolved, because a guessed
location puts somebody's trip in the wrong country and it looks like our mistake. And show
the person their link before you open anything; it is their trip.