Why researching your own holiday is the one thing guaranteeing it won’t be extraordinary.

Article Summary

The more thoroughly you research your holiday, the more it ends up looking like everyone else's. That's the argument Rosanna, our Head of Marketing, explains in this piece. From the Google exercise that proves her point in thirty seconds to the Sri Lankan lake swim that no itinerary would have included, it's a genuinely honest look at what travel planning gets right, and what it often gets wrong.

The problem with planning your own trip

I said what I said.

Don’t get me wrong. Planning your own holiday will most likely end up with you seeing all the main sights. You will go to the top-rated restaurant as shown on Google Maps along with 1,700+ happy travellers. You will get the iconic picture that is in tens of thousands of other camera reels.

You will return home and have had a perfectly lovely time.

But ask yourself something. Did it really and truly blow you away? Did you have that moment where you stopped, took it all in and thought wow.

The internet, social media and now AI have made it easier than ever to see the world

And that’s a good thing. Here’s the catch though. Every Google search, every influencer reel, every AI prompt returns pretty much the same routes, the same itinerary ideas, the same “top” destinations. It’s like every restaurant in town offering the same menu. Different branding on the door, identical food on the table. You can spend hours choosing and still end up with nothing you couldn’t have had anywhere else.

Let’s prove it right now. Open Google. Search “where to go in Thailand.”

Across the first couple of pages the same places come up: Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Phuket, Koh Samui.

And these are all places we can and do include in itineraries, if they’re the right fit for the person on the other end of the phone. But before we get to where, we need to understand why. Your motivations, your purpose, what we call your Traveller DNA. Because that’s the thing that makes a trip genuinely different rather than a tidier version of everyone else’s.

The moments that can’t be searched for

There are moments that simply can’t be Googled. The one where your guide said something that changed how you saw everything. The meal that wasn’t on any foodie blogger’s top ten. The detour that became the memory of the whole trip. Those moments where you thought: I wouldn’t have found this on my own.

We had a review for Thailand that stood out to me:

“The first hotel in Thailand was by coincidence around the corner from the monastery where my Muay Thai teacher and friend grew up and the local guide kindly added a trip to it to our schedule, which was an epic start to my holiday.”

That’s exactly it. And it works both ways. Like the moment my partner, who had never travelled to Asia before, swam in the lake at The Mudhouse in Sri Lanka with monkeys in the trees overhead. That single memory stood out above everything else across two weeks. Or when our guide pulled us off the path to show us hundreds of bats hanging from a fruit tree. Left to my own planning we’d never have done either of those things. I am fairly princess-y where creature comforts are concerned and the idea of a cold shower built into a tree would have put me right off before I’d even got on the plane.

But my Travel Team colleagues listened. Wildlife, nature, minimal crowds. And they designed an itinerary full of those moments. Ones that pushed me out of my comfort zone and left me with memories I’ll have for life.

Does AI make travel planning better?

ChatGPT. Claude. Perplexity. Gemini.

Previously these were just words that very few people would be using in conversation, unless you happened to be:

Deep in the throes of Silicon Valley.
A very good Scrabble player.
A horoscope fanatic.

Fast forward to 2026 and in April alone, 26.4 million people in the UK used AI tools. Travel body ABTA has found that 8% of travellers are now using them to plan their trips. Something we’re starting to see more of in the enquiries we receive.

Here’s the thing though. AI has exactly the same problem as Google. It just feels more sophisticated. It can only draw on what already exists online, synthesising the same sources your search already found. It doesn’t know what you want. It can’t understand what you don’t want. And it absolutely cannot create something that has never been done before.

So if you want a truly special holiday, one that none of your friends have done, that no influencer has posted, that no algorithm has surfaced… let’s start figuring out your Traveller DNA. Get in touch. We’re very good at teasing it out of you, and even better at designing the trip that follows.