I let an LLM research our ski week: what it got right and wrong
By Akos Orban, . I'm the developer of My Next Adventure, the trip planner this was done in. It's free to try.
The brief was one dictated paragraph: one week in the second half of January, two adults and two kids, driving, ideally the Dolomites near Canazei, within walking distance of a lift that connects to the Sella Ronda, and at most 10,000 PLN for the stay (about €2,300), preferably under 8,000. Kreischberg in Austria, where we had been before, as the comparison.
The first answer took ten minutes and was mostly wrong for us
Ten minutes later I had five options in a table, with a recommendation. All from Booking.com, all plausible. Then I started asking questions.
- The recommended apartment was a short walk from the cable car, but you could not ski back to it.
- The only place listed as "ski to door" had no kitchen. With breakfast for four it went over budget.
- Booking's own assistant had answered "yes" to ski-to-door for almost every property, so the LLM had already stopped trusting it. Good.
So the first answer was a fast, tidy version of what I would have found myself in an evening. The useful part came after I pushed back.
Three things I asked for that changed the result
1. Check against the piste map, not the listing. This turned the search around. Only Canazei has a run back to the village my kids can ski, a red. Campitello is lift only, and the one run down to Alba is a black. Half the first shortlist was in the wrong village.
2. Don't rely on Booking. Each valley has its own booking portal, and they showed live prices for our exact family and dates: fassa.com, valgardena.it, altabadia.org, arabba.it. For these villages Booking was mostly over our budget, and the local portals were not. This is where the place we booked came from.
3. Price the passes for our actual kids. A child born in 2019 or later skis free with a paying adult on the Dolomiti Superski pass. That made six days for the four of us €1,099, slightly less than Kreischberg at €1,137. One catch it found: the free child pass is not sold online, so you buy all four at the counter.
Where it went wrong
- A price that was out of date. The best find was listed at €800 for the week. The LLM flagged it as "price may be out of date, needs the owner's confirmation". The owner's real price was about €1,400. Still under our budget, but nearly double. Anything that is not bookable online is a lead, not a price.
- Distances. Listings said 150 m, real walking routes said 10 minutes. It only caught this once the places were on a map with routing.
- Sites that block it. The official ski pass price page refused it, so those prices came from a guide quoting the official ones. Expedia failed every time.
- The party size. The trip was first saved with one adult. I noticed because the totals looked too good.
- Everything human stayed human. I wrote to the owner, I agreed the price, I sent the deposit.
Why the plan lives outside the chat
By the end there were 28 places in five villages. In the chat that is a pile of tables, each one replacing the last, and the reasons for dropping a place scroll away.
The LLM saved every option into My Next Adventure as it went: price, dates, link to the listing, kitchen, bedrooms, the lift it is near, whether you can ski back, and a note on what is still unconfirmed. That gave me a plan I could open on my phone, correct by hand, and show to my family on a map. How we then chose on the TV is a separate story: we picked our ski week on the TV, with the whole family.
I used Claude Code with the mna command line tool. The same thing works from the Claude and ChatGPT apps through the My Next Adventure connector, without a terminal.
What I would tell someone doing the same
- Give it your hard limits first: dates, who is coming with birth years, budget, what is a deal breaker.
- Make it check claims against a map. "Close to the lift" means nothing.
- Ask for local booking sites by name of the valley.
- Treat every price without a "book now" button as a question for the owner.
- Keep the options somewhere that is not the chat.