Are Americans Using AI To Plan Their Summer Vacations?

Planning a vacation usually starts with excitement, then turns into tabs. Flights, hotels, restaurants, activities, prices, and timing all compete for attention at once. For many travelers, that makes vacation planning a natural place for AI to step in.

With summer travel season approaching, including major events like the FIFA World Cup, many Americans may be looking for faster ways to compare destinations, prices, itineraries, and booking options.

What once meant hours of comparing prices, building itineraries, and weighing options can now be compressed into a few prompts, recommendations, or automated actions.

That shift is happening quickly. As AI becomes more involved in how people search, compare, and transact online, travel stands out as one of the clearest places where convenience and trust are beginning to collide. The same tools that can make planning easier also raise new questions about control, oversight, and what people are actually comfortable handing over.

To better understand that tension, we surveyed Americans across the country about how they use AI for travel planning, where they trust it most, what gives them pause, and if those attitudes differ regionally. The findings offer a closer look at how people are thinking about AI’s growing role in travel, from itinerary building and deal hunting to booking authority and payment concerns.

Planning a vacation usually starts with excitement, then turns into tabs. Flights, hotels, restaurants, activities, prices, and timing all compete for attention at once. For many travelers, that makes vacation planning a natural place for AI to step in.

That shift is already becoming visible. HUMAN’s recent research found that AI-driven traffic grew 187% over the course of 2025, and more than 95% of that was concentrated in just three industries: retail and e-commerce, streaming and media, and travel and hospitality. In a category defined by research, comparison, and decision-making, the growth suggests AI is becoming a larger part of how travel gets planned and booked.

Our survey findings reflect that same movement on the consumer side. Americans are not just aware of AI in travel planning. Many are becoming increasingly comfortable using it as a practical tool to help shape a trip from start to finish.

That growing comfort is not limited to travel. In HUMAN’s holiday shopping survey, 64% of Americans said they planned to use AI to help with gift buying, reinforcing the same pattern seen here: people are increasingly open to AI in planning-heavy, decision-driven moments.

Across the survey, the clearest pattern is not full reliance on AI, it’s growing comfortable with using it as support throughout the planning process.

That increase in comfort is worth paying attention to. It suggests that for many travelers, AI is moving out of the experimental phase and into everyday use, especially in a category where the workload can quickly become tedious. Travel planning is full of repetitive tasks — comparing prices, reviewing options, narrowing choices — and those are exactly the kinds of tasks where AI tends to feel most helpful.

That practical mindset shows up even more clearly in the parts of planning people are most willing to hand over. 

Americans say they would most trust AI to help with:

There’s a consistent pattern here. People appear most open to AI when it acts as a research assistant rather than a decision-maker. The strongest use cases center on discovery, comparison, and organization. The parts of travel planning that often take the most time but do not require travelers to give up full control.

As automated and AI-driven traffic rises across the internet (growing about eight times faster than human traffic), travel stands out as one of the environments where automated assistance can deliver immediate value to users. In that sense, the consumer behavior in this survey does not feel disconnected from the larger trend. It feels like the human side of it.

When Americans think about what AI adds to the travel experience, they’re not primarily talking about excitement or experimentation. They’re talking about getting through planning with less effort.

That may be especially valuable during peak summer travel periods, including trips for major events like the upcoming World Cup, when crowded destinations and shifting prices can make planning feel even more time-consuming.

The biggest benefits respondents associate with AI for summer travel planning are:

Finding better deals: 26%

That helps clarify what is driving adoption. AI is gaining traction in travel planning not because people want to outsource the meaning of a trip, but because they want help streamlining the most tedious parts of the process. The value is in helping people get to a better shortlist faster, compare options more easily, and uncover ideas they may not have found on their own.

This also helps explain why travel is emerging as such an important AI category more broadly. When a tool can save time, simplify decisions, and surface better options in a planning-heavy environment, adoption starts to feel less speculative and more intuitive.

The time-saving case becomes even clearer when Americans estimate how much planning time AI could cut from a typical trip.

Many Americans see AI as more than a convenience layer. They see it as something that could materially shorten the amount of time it takes to plan a trip.

That expectation is worth watching. As HUMAN’s research shows, agentic traffic is rising rapidly, and AI systems are starting to move beyond assistance into action. 

The trend is clear. Americans are increasingly comfortable using AI to make travel planning more efficient, especially when it comes to discovery, comparison, and itinerary support. But comfort with AI assistance is not the same as full trust in AI decision-making. 

Next, we’ll look more closely at where that line is today and how Americans feel when AI moves from helping plan a trip to helping book one.

Once AI proves it can save time and simplify planning, the next question is not whether people will use it. It is how far they are willing to let it go.

That question matters more and more because AI systems are becoming much more active online. We know that traffic from AI agents and agentic browsers grew 7,851% year over year in 2025, a sign that AI is moving beyond assisting with research and starting to interact more directly with digital experiences. In travel, that shift raises a more personal question for consumers: where does convenience stop and trust begin?

Our survey suggests users are open to AI helping with the work of planning a trip. But when that help starts to involve payment, autonomy, and accountability, comfort becomes more conditional.

The sharpest trust divide in the survey appears when booking enters the picture.

That gap says a lot. People may be warming to AI as a planning tool, but most still want a human checkpoint before money changes hands. The approval step seems to be the boundary that makes AI feel more like an assistant than an actor.

That hesitation also tracks with how agentic AI is being used more broadly. HUMAN’s April 2026 update found that most observed traffic still centers on product and search routes, even as activity in account, authentication, and checkout environments continues to emerge. For now, people appear more comfortable with AI helping them browse and compare than activating independently at the moment of purchase.

The approval step helps explain where people draw the line. The next question is why. In many cases, the answer comes down to payment and the higher stakes that come with it.

This is where we see the convergence of convenience and stakes in real-world transactions. Planning support feels useful. Payment feels risky. That does not necessarily mean consumers reject AI in travel, it means they are drawing a line between help with decision-making and trust with sensitive financial information.

That hesitation makes sense in the context of the broader internet shift. Account and checkout environments are high-interest targets for abuse, which helps explain why confidence falls when automation starts to look more transactional.

That caution becomes even clearer when respondents think beyond a simple booking flow and picture an important trip.

Even so, there is an important nuance in the data:

That suggests familiarity changes the equation, at least somewhat. Travelers who book more often may be more comfortable with automation because they are more used to the trade-offs involved. They may also be more likely to value speed and convenience in a category they navigate regularly.

But the broader pattern is one to note. When the trip feels important, most Americans still place greater trust in human judgment. AI may be earning a role in planning, but it has not fully earned the authority to replace a person when the stakes feel high.

One of the clearest signs that people see AI booking as a trust issue, not just a usability issue, is how they think responsibility should work when an error costs them money or disrupts a trip.

Among those who believe responsibility should be shared, they say it should fall on:

Americans do not seem to view AI mistakes as isolated user errors. Many see them as part of a broader chain of trust involving the company behind the tool, the user, and the platform or provider involved in the transaction. In other words, once AI begins acting in the real world, expectations shift. People want accountability to be just as real as the automation itself.

In the agentic internet, the challenge is no longer just identifying whether an interaction is automated. It is understanding the intent behind it and applying trust appropriately at each step. Consumers may not describe it in those exact terms, but the survey suggests they are already thinking in a similar way.

Overall, people are far more comfortable with AI helping them plan a trip than acting independently on their behalf, especially when payments, important bookings, and mistakes are involved. 

Next, we look at the boundaries that continue to shape adoption and the concerns that keep many travelers from going further.

Many Americans can see the appeal of using AI to save time and simplify decisions. What they are still working through is where that convenience starts to feel less helpful and more uncertain.

Adoption is not just about access to technology. It is about the conditions under which people feel comfortable using it. In travel, those conditions seem to depend on 2 things: how much control people feel they are giving up, and how familiar they already are with the booking process itself.

The most common concerns Americans have about using AI to book summer travel point to a clear pattern. The hesitation isn’t rooted in curiosity about the technology, it’s rooted in the consequences if something goes wrong.

These concerns reinforce the line that appeared in the trust data. People may be open to AI helping with the work of planning, but adoption becomes more fragile when mistakes could cost money, when oversight disappears, or when support is unclear. 

One of AI’s biggest selling points is that it can tailor recommendations to the individual. But in travel, many Americans still seem unsure whether that promise would actually improve the experience.

Travel is personal by nature, and that may make people more skeptical of tools that optimize too aggressively. If AI starts to flatten taste instead of sharpen it, some of its convenience may start to feel like a trade-off. What saves time could also risk making travel feel less distinct.

That tension also helps explain why adoption is not moving in a straight line. AI may be good at surfacing options quickly, but travelers still want the result to feel like their trip, not a standardized version of one.

That push and pull shows up in how people feel about AI using their history to improve future bookings.

That near split suggests personalization has limits. Many people can see the value in an AI assistant remembering what they like, what they usually spend, and how they tend to travel. But nearly as many are uneasy with what that level of stored context requires.

This is another place where adoption looks conditional. People are interested in better personalization, but not everyone is ready to accept the data retention that might make it possible.

The reluctance to hand over purchasing authority also shows up outside the vacation context.

The hesitation around autonomous booking is not limited to flights and hotels. It appears to reflect a broader preference for oversight when AI completes transactions independently. Travel may bring higher stakes, but the boundary itself seems more general: people are still cautious when AI moves from recommendation into action.

Even so, not all travelers approach these tools the same way. One of the clearest patterns in the survey is that comfort with AI rises alongside travel frequency.

Repeated exposure to travel planning may make AI feel more useful and less intimidating. People who travel often are likely more familiar with the friction points: price comparison, itinerary building, booking windows, and the challenge of finding the best option quickly. For them, the value of AI may feel easier to recognize because the pain points are already familiar.

Those who travel more often are more likely to believe an AI travel assistant could find better deals than they could on their own. Adoption is not driven only by comfort with the technology itself, it’s also shaped by whether people believe the tool can produce a better outcome.

For frequent travelers, AI may feel less like a novelty and more like an advantage. The more often someone books, the easier it may be to view AI as a shortcut to better pricing, faster comparisons, or stronger recommendations.

That pattern becomes even clearer when people are asked whether they would actually let AI book on their behalf.

Frequent travelers aren’t free of concerns, they just may have a higher threshold for usefulness and a clearer sense of what would make automation worth it. Experience seems to build familiarity, and familiarity appears to make some forms of AI-driven booking feel more acceptable.

AI adoption for travel is sorting itself along clear boundaries. Americans are most cautious when the risks feel financial, impersonal, or hard to control. They are more open when the value feels practical and when they have enough experience to judge what AI can do well. 

Next, we narrow the lens from the national picture to the regional one and look at which states appear most eager to embrace AI for travel planning and booking.

National trends help explain how people feel about AI in travel. Regional data shows where those attitudes appear most clearly.

Across the survey, the same pattern holds at the state level as it does nationally: people are far more open to AI when they feel they still have a hand on the wheel. Comfort rises when AI helps with the work of booking, but drops sharply when that same tool is allowed to act on its own. Looking at the states where adoption is highest makes that distinction even easier to see.

Nationally, 42.6% of respondents said they would be comfortable allowing an AI assistant to book travel on their behalf if it asked again for final approval before moving forward with payment.

A handful of states came in well above that mark:

These states stand out because they reflect stronger-than-average comfort with AI taking on a more active role in the booking process, but only with a final human checkpoint in place. 

Alabama, in particular, sits more than 21 percentage points above the national average here, suggesting that in some parts of the country, the idea of AI handling the legwork of booking already feels relatively acceptable, as long as travelers retain the final say.

The picture changes quickly when that final checkpoint is removed.

Nationally, just 11.7% of respondents said they would be comfortable allowing an AI assistant to automatically book travel deals without asking for approval each time, even if it stayed within the budget and preferences they set.

The states most open to that level of autonomy were:

Even the highest-ranking states remain relatively cautious by absolute standards. Texas leads the list, but even there, only one in five respondents said they would be comfortable with AI booking automatically without asking first.

Americans in some states may be fairly open to AI helping execute travel bookings, but much fewer are ready to let it act independently. The contrast between 42.6% national comfort with approval and 11.7% without it reinforces the same trust boundary that showed up throughout the survey: usefulness is gaining acceptance faster than autonomy.

Michigan is especially notable because it appears near the top in both categories. Travelers there may be more open to AI booking overall than respondents in other states, even though the drop-off between assisted booking and fully autonomous booking still remains significant.

The data also helps show where Americans most want AI involved in the planning process. When looking at the part of vacation planning each state would most trust AI with, 4 tasks stood out:

In half the country, the top use case for AI is helping travelers figure out what to do once they get there. More broadly, the most trusted uses still center on discovery, comparison, and recommendations, not decision-making.

People tend to be most comfortable with AI when it helps sort through options, surface ideas, and reduce research time. AI is earning trust first as a guide, not yet as a fully independent travel agent. But we’re getting closer to that.

People are becoming more comfortable using AI to help plan a trip, especially when it can save time, compare options, and reduce the work of researching flights, hotels, and activities. But that comfort still has clear limits. Trust becomes more selective when AI moves closer to payment, autonomy, and higher-stakes decisions, which suggests that adoption is advancing fastest where people still feel they have visibility and control.

That is the challenge taking shape across the broader internet, too. As AI agents become more active in digital journeys, businesses need a way to understand what those agents are doing, verify whether they can be trusted, and set rules around how they interact with users and systems. HUMAN’s AgenticTrust is built for exactly that shift, giving organizations visibility into consumer AI agents, governance over how they act, and controls to help ensure agent-mediated interactions align with user intent and business policy.

The future of travel planning may be more agentic, but it will not be fully trusted by default. It will need to be made trustworthy. That is where the work HUMAN Security does becomes central: helping organizations safely enable AI-driven experiences without losing sight of the trust, security, and control people still expect.

To better understand how attitudes toward AI-driven vacation planning vary across the U.S., we surveyed residents across the country to explore how Americans use AI tools when planning trips and how comfortable they feel with increasingly autonomous agentic AI behaviors.

Respondents were asked a series of structured questions about their familiarity with AI travel tools, whether they’ve used AI for vacation planning, and what tasks they would trust AI to handle, from itinerary planning and deal-finding to booking travel and making purchases on their behalf. The survey also measured broader trust in AI from a commerce perspective, including comfort with AI making purchases in non-travel categories and perceived security when AI handles payment information.

The survey is based on responses from over 2,400 Americans in 48 states. It ran over two weeks in February 2026. Alaska and Wyoming were excluded from the sample due to insufficient survey responses.