Goodbye Travel Agents, Hello AI AgentsSkip to content
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I’m writing this on the Shinkansen heading to Osaka, halfway through a solo 10-day trip across Japan that I planned almost entirely with AI agents.<br>This post isn’t about how AI can write a generic itinerary — anything can do that now. It’s about the small, weirdly clever ways agents earned their keep on this trip: rewriting the itinerary in place so my own trip viewer would render the day correctly, cross-referencing Reddit, YouTube transcripts, and official sources on its own to validate each leg, optimizing a 7-hour layover down to the minute, and replanning the afternoon when check-in finished early.
Note<br>This article was co-created with Claude Opus 4.7 Max . It has been human-reviewed and iteratively revised to my liking — still through AI, in the same conversational loop that powered most of the trip itself. The voice and opinions are mine; the first drafts and clean-up passes are Claude’s.
Just me, a Wanderlog trip, a pile of specific questions, and one orchestrator wiring it together: my own fork of Happy (setup details further down).<br>How I used to plan trips<br>To be honest, I never actually used a travel agent. My planning method was a kind of artisanal scavenger hunt that started with a Google Flights search and spiralled from there: dozens of search tabs, trusting random Reddit reviews from strangers I’d never met, watching hours of YouTube vlogs at 1.5x speed, and reading Wikivoyage end to end. Whatever survived the filter — a temple, a restaurant, a Shinkansen connection — would land in Wanderlog, my trip-planning home for years. It worked, but it was slow, and the signal-to-noise ratio was rough — for every useful tip there were five outdated ones and a sponsored post pretending not to be. I eventually had to build my own app to make Wanderlog bearable; more on that further down.<br>That whole scavenger-hunt pipeline is what AI agents are now quietly replacing for me. Not because the sources are gone — Reddit, Wikivoyage, and YouTube are still where the knowledge lives — but because I no longer have to be the one to ingest, deduplicate, and reconcile it. An agent can read ten YouTube transcripts in the time it would take me to watch one. It can cross-check a Reddit anecdote against the official JR site before I even open a tab. The radical change isn’t that AI is smarter than the internet — it’s that it does the boring synthesis work I used to do by hand.<br>My honeymoon followed a long version of the “golden route” — Tokyo, Nikko, Kyoto, Nara, Osaka, Hiroshima, Yokohama, back to Tokyo — researched the old way: great, but pretty close to everyone else’s trip. For trip number two I wanted something different: a Hokuriku loop with Kanazawa, an onsen night in Kaga, a deliberate detour through Shanghai on the way in and out. The problem with going off-script is that there’s no script. You’re back to research — comparing trains, checking restaurant queues, double-checking whether your passport actually qualifies for visa-free transit. That’s where AI agents stopped being a curiosity and started being genuinely useful.<br>I’ve already written about how AI made me a happier engineer; turns out it also makes me a happier traveler. I’ll get to the actual stack later in the post.<br>The trip, briefly<br>10 days, five Japanese stops, one Shanghai detour:<br>Tokyo — arrival, mid-trip pivot, and final base.<br>Kanazawa — new territory, anchoring a Hokuriku loop back through places I loved last time.<br>Kaga Onsen — one night in a ryokan.<br>Osaka — a long day on the way south.<br>Shanghai — twice, courtesy of the flight routing. Outbound I left the airport (last year’s China trip skipped Shanghai); return stays airside.<br>Roughly 60 places on the trip, four flights, half a dozen Shinkansen and limited-express reservations, and exactly zero printed PDFs.<br>A 7-hour layover, edited from inside it<br>The trip starts with a 7-hour Shanghai layover. An earlier session had already brainstormed a candidate route — Yu Garden, The Bund, a sit-down xiaolongbao lunch — so the question for the next session wasn’t what should I do but the much more useful am I actually gonna make it?<br>What came back wasn’t a vague “yes, you have time.” It was:<br>A check on PVG immigration wait times from live data<br>Confirmation that my passport qualifies for visa-free transit (and a warning not to ask for the 240-hour transit stamp — the 30-day visa-free entry is the right lane)<br>Maglev timings vs. metro alternatives<br>A queue-aware lunch slot: 11:55 AM at Jia Jia Tang Bao, not 12:15, because the line spikes at noon<br>A backup: Lin Long Fang, run by the same family, two blocks away, almost no queue<br>I followed it almost verbatim. Then, mid-route, I realised I was running ahead of plan, so I opened the session and typed:<br>I’m in Shanghai right now...