AI Can Make Travel Suggestions. Backroads Brings a Trip to Life.

Imagine arriving at a local family’s home in Portugal for an intimate lunch, accented by Vinho Verde and a spontaneous Fado performance. Or making a stop along a biking route in Basque Country at a neighborhood co-op in an otherwise nondescript location, where you’re delighted to find the bilingual conversation flowing as freely as the coffee.  

Ask Kerry Tiedeman, Regional Director for Portugal, or Lara Petinal, Senior Regional Field Lead for Spain & the Canary Islands, and they’ll confidently tell you that these experiences can’t be found on a travel platform or anywhere on the web. They’re facilitated by dedicated and passionate Backroads experts who spend years immersed in a destination, developing and nurturing relationships, learning how a place works and refining the experience trip by trip, year after year.  

“AI is only as good as what’s online,” explains Justin Brown, Director of Trip Development. “And what’s online is often wrong, window-dressed, inaccurate or incomplete. That’s when it’s not hallucinating.”  

Because AI is trained on titanic loads of content that it trawls from the internet, the output is based on algorithms optimized to recognize patterns. So the info it assembles for you tends to be heavily weighted toward popular attractions, destinations with robust social media marketing, large booking sites and the wisdom of crowds. “It can state what’s buzzy,” says Trip Leader Ben Lilly. “Thus, by definition, it can’t point out the otherwise invisible.”

When Lilly leads a trip, he loves pointing out small things that might go unnoticed by most travelers, like a poem carved under the eaves of a chalet, some cute pigs or a cheese vending machine. “At an inviting stream with pebbles on the bottom, we might take off our shoes and walk barefoot because I tell guests that ‘Kneippen,’ or therapeutic barefoot walking in cold water, is a German tradition,” he says. “AI could never spontaneously make that connection and turn it into an idea for an action.”  

Don’t get me wrong. Artificial intelligence can be a useful travel-planning tool to generate ideas, compare options and home in on your preferences. But just know that when you trust AI to handle your active adventure, you’ll end up with a list of suggestions and responsibilities. On the other hand, when you book a trip with Backroads, we handle everything for you. And you can trust that we’ll deliver an experience that’s extraordinary—maybe even better than you could have imagined.  

Backroads Trip Leaders know which temple feels completely different in the rain, where guests naturally want to linger and when a tiny interaction with a member of the local community will end up being the hot topic at dinner. This level of authenticity, depth and attention requires curiosity and a desire to learn and improve along with flexibility, empathy and adaptability.  

“A route can look beautiful on a map and technically work, but when you’ve actually been there, you know that the shoulder disappears at a certain point, that traffic changes at a particular time of day or that the ‘less famous’ road on the other side of the valley is actually where you want our guests to be,” says Backroads Field Manager Shauna Pugliese.  

“We aren’t just designing itineraries based on what exists,” Pugliese continues. “We’re designing around how a place actually feels and functions.” Cameron Breslin, Regional Director for Latin America, agrees: “Our staff spend a great amount of personal time living in these destinations while we research, build, launch and run these trips, and that experience gets passed on to our guests in a way AI will never be able to replicate.” 

While AI can produce an itinerary based on published information, such as ferry, train and bus schedules, estimated travel times, opening and closing hours for businesses and third-party recommendations, it can’t predict or mitigate the downstream effects when a deviation from the itinerary occurs. Pugliese notes that Japan is a great example of how a simple request or change in plans can look good on paper but not necessarily in practice.  

“There are so many moments where a guest might ask:  

Can’t we just take a different train?

Could we send the luggage ahead?

Could I skip this activity and meet you later?

“But when you really know Japan,” she emphasizes, “you understand the chain reaction behind those decisions: luggage forwarding timelines, train schedules, vehicle access, where a bus can physically meet someone, language, vendor relationships, hotel logistics and what is culturally appropriate.” These insights mean the difference between “No, we can’t do that,” and “Let’s see how we can make this work.” The fact is that the nature of travel is dynamic and unpredictable. But when the unexpected occurs, that’s where Backroads shines.  

“What I love about the way Backroads operates is that the first question is almost never, How do we preserve the itinerary exactly as written? It’s How do we preserve the guest experience?” says Pugliese. In Vietnam during monsoon season, the team on the ground was forced to change the trip entirely on the fly. They adeptly rearranged the hotel rotation and added a brand-new hotel to stay out of the storm’s path. At one point, leaders were transporting guests to dinner in canoes! That’s an adventure worth telling for generations.

Whether it’s severe weather, plane or ferry delays or cancellations or guest illness or injury, Backroads’ office and field staff work diligently behind the scenes to preserve the guest experience. For almost 50 years, making every guest feel well taken care of has been a top priority, which becomes even more important when things go off script. It’s in these moments when the institutional and regional knowledge, local connections and creativity of real people prove to be invaluable.

From designing and researching a trip to running it, a Backroads adventure is full of instances where the human touch makes all the difference. When serendipity and training conspire to turn a guest’s disappointment into a joyful surprise or a sincere moment of connection or generosity into a trip highlight.  

• One guest, a former athlete, was experiencing mobility issues on a Switzerland trip that limited her activity more than she’d anticipated. Leaders worried that an upcoming day with a 20-minute walk to the train station could be a challenge for her, so they arranged for one of Interlaken’s horse-drawn carriages to carry her and her husband to the station. As the couple pulled away from the curb like Cinderella and Prince Charming, everyone cheered and waved. The touristy horse-drawn carriage was just the goofy but thoughtful gesture to make what could have been a distressing situation into a fun opportunity for the whole group to show their support.  
• On the first night of the Provence to the French Riviera Biking Tour, Trip Leaders asked the group, “What are you looking forward to on this trip?” One guest deadpanned: “The big finish when we ride into Paris on the Champs-Élysées.” (The trip takes place in the south of France, nowhere close to Paris!) The group laughed after realizing he was only kidding and not on the wrong trip. But the comment stuck with the leaders. On the last night, they drew a large Arc de Triomphe and attached it to a wall in the location where the ride finished. They even laid out a toilet-paper-edged Champs-Élysées!  
• A family of three (father and two adult children) traveled with us on our Thailand Biking Tour recently. Early on, they openly spoke about the loss of their mom years ago and how they honored her annually with a special trip. Shauna Pugliese was one of their Trip Leaders: “Ghing, our national guide, and I got into a deep conversation about death and Buddhism with the family one night, and it was really meaningful. The two of us wanted to do something special for them and asked if they would like to join us to visit a special temple that Ghing knew about on an evening when guests were scheduled to dine on their own. They did, and we held a full Thai ceremony to send love to their mother and honor her life.” They shared that it was a gesture they would never forget.
• On one Backroads Vietnam & Cambodia Women’s Biking Tour, a long mid-trip flight delay that could have left guests disgruntled and irritated turned into a sunset celebration when the leader team made a spontaneous decision to take guests out onto Vietnamese basket boats. The women sang, danced and drank wine until it was time to head to the airport, where fresh hot pork buns and banh mi sandwiches were waiting. When the group finally arrived at the hotel in Cambodia at 2 a.m., a full Khmer arrival team was there, providing assurance to the guests that they would be taken care of, despite the delay! 

A recent study commissioned by Mindtrip, Sabre and Sojern found that more than 50 percent of travelers surveyed already use AI to plan trips, while 75 percent intend to use it for future travel.  

AI’s not going anywhere—that’s a fact. At Backroads, we know it can be a helpful tool when it comes to general travel advice. And it can lead you to the humans that can actually make your dream trip a reality. Like the ones at Backroads.  

Where do we go from here? Our answer, of course, is everywhere.

Check out all of our award-winning active adventures, brought to you by the real people at Backroads.