When Will Your Toaster Send You on Vacation to Mars?

Artificial intelligence is hot on humanity’s heels: the tourism industry freezes in a swallow pose, waiting to see if robots will start packing suitcases and ironing sun hats. Just a little longer, and ChatGPT will fly to Bali for you, then send a notification: “Remove one swimsuit, there’s a hanger shortage on the island!”

But as The Economist whispers, for now AI behaves like a tourism student who’s landed in an airport for the first time: enthusiastically booking you a ticket with thirteen layovers through Yakutia and recommending a motel where the floors were last cleaned in the dinosaur era.

They say technology will soon make travel personalized to the point of absurdity: algorithms will guess your taste buds and suggest the address of a wine cellar unknown even to the local grape seed. But for now, artificial intelligence resembles a teleport manager from the nineties: confusing Turkey with Turkmenistan and mistaking allergies for buckwheat fasting.

Prophets assure us that in the coming years the market will be taken over by robot consultants who will help you search, but won’t save you from the traditional “are we really not going to get scammed?” Still, the people’s lottery remains—reading reviews by Natalia P. and Sergey R., whose mystical knowledge of the tourism universe even AI can’t match.