Airial: Ex-Meta Engineers Launch AI-Powered Travel Planning Tool

Ex-Meta engineers have built an AI tool to plan every detail of your trip | TechCrunch

The travel industry has gathered extensive data over the years about trips and transportation, and founders are using it to use it to create every conceivable kind of AI travel startup. In fact, every word of this sentence is a link to a new AI travel tool. Now, startups and incumbent travel tech companies are in a race to build one comprehensive tool that could plan and manage every part of your trip. Airial is one of the contenders that's banking on its ability to map out your entire travel experience end-to-end. At a surface level, here's how it works: to begin, you can type in some details about any trip that you want to take, and the AI will create a plan for you, including your starting and ending points. You can choose an instant trip function to quickly create a travel plan that includes flights, hotels, and transport across multiple cities. The platform also generates a daily itinerary for you to visit interesting places and eat at restaurants. You can specify your preferences while planning or modify them later after looking at the plan. The interface shows you your overall trip plan, and you can click on each phase to see the daily itinerary and the places AI has suggested for you to visit. You can click on each item to see an overview, reviews, location, and alternatives. Plus, the assistant can answer questions about each particular place for you. Airial also shows a map view of all the places you are visiting that day, so you can gauge the distance between points. It also shows details like transfer time, wait time at train stations, and whether you can take a day trip to a place nearby. Moreover, you can add a link to a blog, TikTok, or a Reel, and add items mentioned by a creator to your itinerary. The tool also surfaces TikTok videos related to a city based on your prompts and details that you've provided, so if you don't have a prior inspiration, you don't have to look for it. The company was founded by Archit Karandikar and Sanjeev Shenoy, who were college friends in India. Karandikar has held various engineering roles at Meta, Google, and Waymo, working on using AI in products. Shenoy worked at Meta primarily on the team that developed Instagram Reels. The duo said that they've always had a passion for travel, so they wanted to build something in the sector. They described the Airial experience as working with your family's travel agent. "Pretty much all the other companies we know in the space are focused on creating a rough plan for you. With our models, we reason thoroughly over the logistics part of your trip with a focus on details. We integrate dozens of APIs and consider many parameters to map out your flights and trains, figure out connectivity time, and [determine the] proximity of activities from your hotel," Karandikar told TechCrunch over a call. Karandikar said that the startup's value proposition to users is personalization and time saving. He said that if you are a vegetarian and mention that to the AI tool, it will only suggest suitable eating joints for you. The company has based the training of its AI models on a paper by DeepMind researchers called AlphaGeometry. According to the startup, the paper describes an AI system that solves geometry problems. At its core, Airial is combining that inference method with LLMs to build travel plans. The startup has raised $3 million in seed funding that was led by Montage Ventures with participation from South Park Commons, Peak XV (formerly Sequoia India), and individual investors from Meta, UiPath, and Dropbox. Daphne Che, a principal at Montage Ventures, said that the team's technical understanding will give them an edge over other teams. "I think every consumer who wants to plan travel will run into issues of [too] many options and variables to figure out. It is hard for a company just using LLMs straight up to solve these problems. Airial's tech stack can reason over thousands of variables to figure out the best spots and transport for you while keeping your requirements in mind," she said. Airial said it has "tens of thousands of monthly visitors," and the company is focusing on growing users rather than revenue. The company said it recently added features like trip sharing and collaborative trip building. It has also added cars and buses as options for multi-city transit. The travel tool has further added a social aspect, which allows users to view a friend's trip and modify it. In the coming months, the company wants to work on iOS and Android apps for its platform. The startup also wants to provide verticalized search for hotels, activities, and influencer videos.

Meet Airial, the company that uses AI to automate every step of the trip-planning process

Spending long hours in front of a computer screen trying to plan vacations could soon become a thing of the past. The travel industry has enthusiastically embraced generative AI in recent years. Expedia, for example, integrated a ChatGPT-powered customer service chatbot into its app in early 2023. Kayak did something similar one year later, launching an AI platform trained on customer data and designed to provide personalized, real-time travel recommendations. Also: Are AI subscriptions worth it? Most people don't seem to think so, according to this study Now, an up-and-coming player in the industry is aiming to take things one step further, using AI to automate every step of the trip-planning process, from brainstorming to booking, for free. Launched in public beta in December, Airial Travel positions itself as an automated travel agent that helps users customize and plan travel itineraries based on their interests. Also: ChatGPT was downloaded 30 million times last month - but its user base data is more shocking Airial was founded by former engineers from Google, Meta, and Waymo, and leverages its proprietary AI model. The company has reportedly raised $3 million in seed funding. Airial's platform allows users to describe their travel goals using natural language. Like other AI chatbots, the more specific your prompts, the easier it'll be for the system to recommend something useful and tailored to your tastes. But you can also start broad, and the tool will help you narrow down your preferences. For example, you might provide Airial's AI assistant with the following description of your vague ambitions to travel this fall: "I'm taking two weeks off of work in October, and want to travel somewhere warm, and not too expensive. Maybe somewhere in the Mediterranean region or in the Caribbean. I also don't want to be surrounded by too many tourists. Somewhere highly walkable would be ideal, too." It'll then attempt to gain a better understanding of your interests, providing you with a few options to choose from, like "Beach relaxation" and "Cultural experiences." You can also specify any specific activities you'd like to partake in while traveling. Also: Anthropic launches new AI feature to build your own customizable chatbots From there, Airial will provide a rough outline of an itinerary. (In response to the prompts outlined above, the bot suggested a three-city excursion across Italy and Croatia.) The platform also allows you to adjust for preferences like dietary restrictions, hotel star rating, and flight accommodations. The chatbot also includes an "Instant Plan" option, which can be toggled on at the beginning of the conversation. This option will cause the chatbot to skip any follow-up questions to provide you with a suggested itinerary immediately. To add an extra spark of motivation, the platform connects you with TikTok videos filmed in locations that are relevant to the details provided by your prompts.

This AI travel agent can plan your next trip's entire itinerary - for free

Spending long hours in front of a computer screen trying to plan vacations could soon become a thing of the past. The travel industry has enthusiastically embraced generative AI in recent years. Expedia, for example, integrated a ChatGPT-powered customer service chatbot into its app in early 2023. Kayak did something similar one year later, launching an AI platform trained on customer data and designed to provide personalized, real-time travel recommendations. Also: Are AI subscriptions worth it? Most people don't seem to think so, according to this study Now, an up-and-coming player in the industry is aiming to take things one step further, using AI to automate every step of the trip-planning process, from brainstorming to booking, for free. Launched in public beta in December, Airial Travel positions itself as an automated travel agent that helps users customize and plan travel itineraries based on their interests. Also: ChatGPT was downloaded 30 million times last month - but its user base data is more shocking Airial was founded by former engineers from Google, Meta, and Waymo, and leverages its proprietary AI model. The company has reportedly raised $3 million in seed funding. However, Airial doesn't have the market for end-to-end travel planning cornered because platforms like Mindtrip and Layla offer similar services. Airial's platform allows users to describe their travel goals using natural language. Like other AI chatbots, the more specific your prompts, the easier it'll be for the system to recommend something useful and tailored to your tastes. But you can also start broad, and the tool will help you narrow down your preferences. For example, you might provide Airial's AI assistant with the following description of your vague ambitions to travel this fall: "I'm taking two weeks off of work in October, and want to travel somewhere warm, and not too expensive. Maybe somewhere in the Mediterranean region or in the Caribbean. I also don't want to be surrounded by too many tourists. Somewhere highly walkable would be ideal, too." It'll then attempt to gain a better understanding of your interests, providing you with a few options to choose from, like "Beach relaxation" and "Cultural experiences." You can also specify any specific activities you'd like to partake in while traveling. Also: Anthropic launches new AI feature to build your own customizable chatbots From there, Airial will provide a rough outline of an itinerary. (In response to the prompts outlined above, the bot suggested a three-city excursion across Italy and Croatia.) The platform also allows you to adjust for preferences like dietary restrictions, hotel star rating, and flight accommodations. The chatbot also includes an "Instant Plan" option, which can be toggled on at the beginning of the conversation. This option will cause the chatbot to skip any follow-up questions to provide you with a suggested itinerary immediately. To add an extra spark of motivation, the platform connects you with TikTok videos filmed in locations that are relevant to the details provided by your prompts.