Should I use AI to plan a rail holiday?

If you ask AI to plan a European train trip, it'll produce something that looks like an itinerary. It’ll list cities, recommend connections, estimate journey times and sometimes recommend places to stay. The output looks great and appears confident, but what you're looking at is text generated from statistical patterns in the chatbot's training data, rather than a plan checked against any real timetable or booking system. The errors and hallucinations it contains can be very hard to spot until you've turned up at a station to find out your train isn't running, or worse, doesn’t exist.

Zulfugar Karimov

What does AI travel planning do?

AI language models work by predicting which words are most likely to follow other words, based on the data they were trained on. This makes them good at producing coherent and plausible writing, but they’re not always accurate. Since they don't have a direct link to real-time rail timetable information or the ability to verify if a train service is running on a specific day, they can’t provide users with reliable information.

This is a well-known issue. In February 2025, a BBC investigation asked four leading AI language models to summarise 100 news articles and found that 51% of the answers contained significant issues, including incorrect statements and wrong dates. And a study published in the Journal of Consumer Behaviour examined ChatGPT-generated travel itineraries specifically and concluded that hallucinations significantly reduced travellers' perceptions of the itineraries' accuracy and trustworthiness. The same research noted that eliminating these hallucinations from current AI tools is not yet possible.

Frank van Hulst

Where do errors appear in an AI travel plan?

Routes and connections

Chatbots have no real model of geography or real distance. They suggest a connection because the place names involved often appear together in travel writing, but they don’t check whether the service currently runs or whether the timing fits. The results include routings that can add hours through unnecessary changes, transfer windows that are too tight to make in reality, and sometimes, trains that just don't exist.

CNBC reported on a traveller in Paris who arrived late to a business appointment after ChatGPT suggested a route that failed to account for road closures. The same article states that travel experts describe how AI creates attractions that aren't real and combines information from two separate areas into a single attraction. When a HuffPost writer used AI to plan a trip to Portland, she said it sent her from one side of the city to another and told her that long walks were short. She also noted that the AI didn't take into consideration when businesses would be closed or how a holiday would affect an attraction's opening hours. If you are taking a cross-country European rail journey, mistakes like these could leave you missing the last train of the day and stranded overnight.

Booking rules

European rail ticketing is complicated and varies by country and by operator. Each national railway runs its own ticketing system and website, and while aggregators and third-party retailers can sell the same fares, some advance tickets and discounts are only bookable through the operator that runs the train. Seat reservations are compulsory on many high-speed and international services, including the high-speed national and international routes, and are optional on others, and the booking websites don't always make it clear which is which.

Timings are another issue. Booking windows differ by operator and country, with some routes opening only around 60 days in advance, while others open six months to a year in advance. So, an LLM ticket may not be available yet or might already be sold out. Rail expert Mark Smith, who runs Seat61, points out that some cross-border tickets still rely on an inter-operator system called TCV, which can cost considerably more than booking direct and requires a hard-copy ticket to be posted to you rather than issued to your phone. The European Union has acknowledged how complicated and fragmented cross-border travel booking currently is. In May 2026, the European Commission proposed new rules to let passengers find, compare, and buy services from different rail operators as a single ticket in a single transaction, alongside stronger protections for travellers who miss a connection on a multi-operator journey.

Viktor Rejent

Booking it yourself

Even if you manage to catch every error and you’ve got a trip that works, you still have to book it. For a multi-country itinerary, that can mean using several national rail websites in succession, some with limited English-language support and some that need a local phone number (or hate your email for no apparent reason). You need to identify the right platform for each leg and work out whether a seat reservation is required and included in the fare you're buying. You'll also need to buffer your connections sensibly, because a single delay can ruin the whole trip. 

At Byway, we recommend leaving about an hour between connections, and more if you need to change stations, to account for delays and for the time it takes to simply walk between platforms. A chatbot won't build in that margin for you. This is the kind of thing experienced rail travellers plan around carefully, and it's part of what we handle on every Byway trip.

If something goes wrong

AI itineraries also don’t account for moments when a plan might break down, and they can’t offer any support. When a train is cancelled, a connection is missed through no fault of your own, or a ticket turns out not to be valid for the service you boarded, a DIY traveller has to resolve it alone, often at a foreign station, under time pressure, with the rest of the itinerary depending on getting it right.

Recommendations

A less critical, but extremely annoying, error is in the recommendations AI suggests. Because its knowledge is frozen at the point its training data was collected, it won't know that the boat trip down the Douro doesn't run in winter, or that the highly-recommended vegan café closed its doors for good last year. These slip-ups can happen to human planners too, but they're far more likely with AI working from outdated information.

It also tends to pick recommendations that get written about most, which are usually the busiest and most heavily marketed. Ask a chatbot where to eat in Lyon, and you'll often get the same handful of names as everyone else, rather than the quiet bouchon in a lesser-visited neighbourhood that a local would point you to. A trip built this way can feel generic and boring, stitched together from the internet's most repeated recommendations instead of shaped around your interests. For the most up-to-date and reliable picture, you're better off checking museum and attraction websites directly, activity platforms like GetYourGuide or Viator, or local bloggers and magazines who know the place you’re visiting.

Walling

When could I use AI for rail travel?

All of this might read as though AI has no place in trip planning, but that isn't entirely true. As a starting point for early research, it can be useful. If you're not sure where a slow travel holiday could even take you, a chatbot is a quick way to surface ideas, and it's often better than a search engine at answering a vague, open question like 'where could I go by train from London for a long weekend?'. It can give you a rough sense of which regions are reachable by rail, how long the journeys usually take, which cities pair well over a week, what each place is known for, and when the best time of year to visit might be. For people who've only ever flown, that can help to open up the idea that overland travel is an option. 

But, where it fails is in the step from inspiration to a reliable plan. An itinerary can look right, but still not work once you check it against the real timetables, which an LLM can’t do. The sensible approach is to let AI give you ideas, then take that plan to someone who can check it against the real network. So, if a chatbot has got you dreaming about a slow journey through the Alps, the next question is who can actually make it happen.

Ben Cridge

What does Byway do?

Byway plan and book flight-free holidays by train, ferry and bus across the UK and Europe. Every itinerary is built and checked by people with direct working knowledge of European rail networks, and verified against real booking systems and current timetables. Tickets are sourced and issued for you across the operators and platforms required for the trip, and accommodation is included. If disruption happens while you're travelling, there's a real, human support team on WhatsApp to help you sort it out.

At Byway, we're a team of real travel experts who check every route, book your tickets, sort your accommodation, and step in the moment anything goes sideways. Our technology surfaces our human knowledge online, shaping routes that focus on local trains and ferries, surfacing stop-offs you might never find on your own.

Our trips tend to favour routes and stops that don't appear in standard chatbot output. Because the planning draws on our travel experts' knowledge, itineraries regularly highlight slower, scenic connections and smaller towns, which in our experience tend to be quieter and more rewarding to travel through than the default high-speed options most chatbots suggest.

Byway

Want to build your own trip with Byway?

If what drew you to AI was the freedom to shape a trip, our Maps tool  lets you choose your own destinations and build a route across Europe, which our travel experts then turn into a verified itinerary checked against the live network. You get a journey planned around the places you want to see, with human input at every stage: routes built by travel experts who know the networks, tickets and accommodation sorted for you, a trip guide holding all your tickets, accommodation and journey details alongside recommendations picked by our team, free replanning if there's disruption, and a team on hand if you need support along the way.

Read about how to plan a European holiday by train, the art of slow travel, or six of the most scenic trains in Europe.

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