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Mindtrip, a Silicon Valley startup founded by e-commerce veterans, announced the launch of its AI-powered travel platform today, aiming to provide consumers with a more intuitive, personalized, and comprehensive trip planning experience.

The platform leverages large language models (LLMs), natural language processing (NLP), and a proprietary knowledge base to enable travelers to plan trips through an interactive chat window. Mindtrip can provide inspiration and recommendations, answer follow-up questions, and help users build detailed itineraries — all within a single application.

“Natural language just seems like a perfect way to bring it all together, because it’s very conversational,” Andy Moss, CEO and co-founder of Mindtrip, said in an interview. “If I’m talking about a trip to Sicily, I [would] want to detour and ask about the food, because I’m into restaurants and where to eat. Or I want to ask about where to go hiking, or the cultural history.”

Moss, a serial entrepreneur, co-founded Mindtrip with several longtime collaborators, including veterans of companies like Ariba and Roadster. The team saw an opportunity to apply LLMs to the complex and fragmented process of travel planning.

Personalized and fluid travel planning with conversational AI

While chatbots like ChatGPT can answer travel questions, Mindtrip aims to go further by combining the conversational elements with rich visuals, geospatial data, and booking capabilities. For any location or point of interest the AI mentions, users can see photos, maps, and detailed information without leaving the interface.

“If you just get a stream of words coming back from OpenAI, that’s actually quite complicated,” explained Moss. “We’ve done a lot of work to detect the named entities correctly and tie them into our knowledge base, so you can explore relevant content or book straight from the conversation.”

Another key differentiator is Mindtrip’s focus on personalization. Users can specify their travel preferences and constraints, which the AI then factors into its recommendations and itinerary building. They can further customize suggested itineraries through a combination of dialog and direct manipulation.

“People ask why we recommend certain things,” said Moss. “Well, we give you the ability to actually tell us about how you like to travel, so that when we do answer, we can put it in that context.”

Making travel recommendations actionable

Michelle Denogean, Mindtrip’s Chief Marketing Officer, emphasized the advantage of consolidating the many aspects of trip planning into a single, user-friendly application.

“There’s a ton of content out in the world on travel, and so many recommendations, but they’re not actionable and they’re not customizable,” she said. “What we ask at Mindtrip is, how do you make that actionable, customizable — and then be able to do it all in one place?”

In addition to its consumer-facing product, Mindtrip plans to provide its tools to travel industry partners, including tourism boards, travel agencies, airlines and hotel chains. Many in the industry see AI assistants as an important emerging distribution channel.

With $7 million in seed funding, the company faces competition from tech giants like Google and Microsoft, which are also integrating conversational AI into their travel products; however, Moss believes there is an important role for an AI-first, vertically-focused player.

“Much like there was vertical search, we see this playing out with vertical AI,” he said. “The personalization and specialized content that’s needed for travel can be done better by a focused player than a horizontal one.”

As AI begins to transform the way people discover and plan trips online, Mindtrip aims to set itself apart through its powerful natural language interface, rich knowledge base, and focus on actionability. But it remains to be seen whether it can become a leader in the rapidly evolving world of AI-powered travel tech.