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 are unreachable to an assistant, and not on purpose.
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.
| 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 | no |
The front page answered our automated browser with a bot challenge instead of the
site, so no trip-building flow was reachable to test. |
| Planiter | no |
Nothing answered at its web address on either protocol. It is distributed as an
iPhone app, which an assistant cannot install. |
| Kintinery | yes |
An account. Its button offering a free start leads to a registration form. |
| TripIt | yes |
An account. Every route into building a trip from the front page goes to account
creation. |
| places.is | yes |
An account. Starting a plan goes through a sign-up step first. |
| Roadtrippers | yes |
Nothing, to plan. Its route planner genuinely opens and works without a person
attached. Whether keeping or sharing the result needs an account, we did not test, so we
are not going to claim it. |
Tested 3 August 2026, from a plain automated browser. These are
configurations, not laws of nature — any of them can change the day after we looked, and
two of them are settings someone could flip back this afternoon. Re-tested quarterly.
You do not have to take our word for any of 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. Several of the tools
above describe themselves in language close to ours. The difference is that this one is
checkable in a browser in under a minute, and a description is not.
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, and a plain URL if it does not. 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.