Beyond The Grid

Beyond the Grid Episode 10: The Modern Way to Plan a Trip

May 26, 2026

6 mins Read

By Supriya Sahu

Two creators. Two completely different travel personalities. One question that neither of them could answer the same way twice.

Episode 10 of Beyond the Grid started with a title: The Real Way to Plan a Trip. By the time the conversation got going, the creators themselves had renamed it. Not the real way. The modern way. Because nobody in the room was willing to call the old approach wrong, or the new one flawless.

That tension held the whole episode together.

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Aakash opened with a confession: he uses AI before every trip for itineraries, budget estimates, transport options. The more he plans, the easier the travel. Sneha pushed back immediately. She still trusts Google Maps more than any AI tool. She has been left outside a café that did not exist because an AI said it did.

That honesty set the tone. This was not a show about AI being the answer. It was about two people, and two guests, who have each tried it, trusted it in different ways, and learned exactly where it earns that trust and where it does not.

Deanna Troy: Intentional, over-planned, and occasionally lost in Ireland

"I picked Lisbon because everyone was saying Tokyo, everyone was saying Sydney. I just picked the one nobody mentioned."

Deanna travels with structure. She calls her travel personality "intentional", every trip thought through, every meal considered, because her husband is vegan and the restaurant question alone can derail a day.

She started in 2016, backpacking Southeast Asia the old way: Facebook groups, travel blogs, asking locals. She has since covered Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Laos, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. She lived in Da Nang for six months and still says Vietnamese food is her favourite anywhere.

The Europe chapter came later, and differently. She won Taylor Swift Eras Tour tickets on Instagram. Instead of picking the obvious cities, she looked at the comments and chose Lisbon, Portugal specifically because nobody else was saying it.

That is Deanna's travel logic. Not contrarian for the sake of it. Just genuinely more interested in going somewhere that has not already been digested by every other travel account.

On AI: a rough draft, not a director

Deanna describes AI as the first layer of trip planning. It gives you the rough draft, fast. You take what fits, drop what does not, and keep a day or two open for what you could not have planned.

The moment that changed how she thinks about it happened in Ireland. She was trying to find a small local spot, a lane where travellers write notes on the walls. Not an official destination. Not on any tourist map. Google Maps sent her to a road and gave up. She pulled up AI, described exactly what she could see around her, and asked: am I close? It walked her there.

"Google Maps didn't know. AI guided me based on what I was describing, and I got there."

Vegan travel and the gap no single tool fills

Running a YouTube series about vegan food around the world means Deanna thinks about this more than most. She uses HappyCow for specialist listings and AI for the gaps, searching by distance from her hotel, asking what has vegan options rather than what is purely vegan. Neither tool alone gets her the full picture. Together, they usually do.

In the live Eia demo, she asked for ten vegan spots in Dublin for a couple. She had personally visited five of them. Two on the list were new to her. The test passed.

The best experience of her Ireland trip, by the way, had nothing to do with food or AI. It was the Aran Islands near Galway. Countryside and coastline in the same view. Cows standing at the edge of the sea. Electric bicycles to cover the whole island at your own pace. "I've never seen that combination before," she said. She is not wrong.

Prapti Gogoi: Free-spirited, solo, and planning trips around concerts

Prapti travels without forcing rigid plans. She calls herself free-spirited, and she means it, not as a personality brand, but as a practical approach.

Her first solo international trip came because of Blackpink. The concert was in Jakarta. She built the trip around it, kept moving through Indonesia and Malaysia, and then added Singapore as a last-minute decision. No plan. No research. Just ChatGPT for the MRT system.

"Singapore was totally unplanned, and I didn't take an inch of stress, thanks to AI, honestly."

She navigated MRT line changes, fare structures, and zone transfers by asking ChatGPT questions the way you would ask a friend who has been there. It worked. The city felt manageable within hours.

Her 2026 energy is Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lakpa Sherpa, the Netflix documentary about the most prolific female Everest summiteer in history. Prapti did not have to explain why. It was obvious.

On AI and solo female safety

Prapti made a point nobody else in the conversation had raised. When she mentions in a prompt that she is a solo female traveller, AI automatically adds a safety layer to the response, flagging neighbourhoods, noting local norms, prioritising well-reviewed stays. She did not ask for it. It just appeared.

"I don't know if it reads my emotion somehow, but it already adds points on how to travel safe as a woman."

She pairs that with reviews filtered specifically for women travellers, stays rated and commented on by solo women, and makes her final accommodation call from there. It is not AI alone. It is AI as a starting filter, human judgement as the close.

She also does not post her location while travelling. Safety, not superstition. She posts after she has left.

The one thing she would never trust AI with

Her emotions. Full stop.

Solo travel gets lonely sometimes. You are afraid, or overwhelmed, or sitting in a city where nobody knows your name. Those moments need something no tool can give. "I won't trust that with AI, never," she said.

Her favourite country from that first trip: Singapore. Clean, efficient, organised. She has even looked up what it would take to move there. She is not ruling it out.

The Eia segment: when the tool gets tested live

The final segment put Alike's AI trip planner, Eia, on screen with both creators watching.

Deanna's prompt: a couple in Dublin, ten vegan restaurants. Eia returned a list of ten spots ranging from casual cafés to full sit-down restaurants, with walking distances and brief descriptions. Deanna verified five from personal experience. Two were new to her. "It passed the test," she said.

Prapti's prompt: solo female traveller, Bali, three days, mid-budget, off-beat locations, from India, safe stays, cute cafés, no long commutes. Eia opened its response with a line Aakash read aloud: this itinerary is designed for safety and soul-searching. It listed EVOA requirements, neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood safety notes, and a timeline that could be rearranged by day.

Prapti's reaction: "I really love how organised the whole system is. It's all in one platform. That's breakthrough."

The thing that separated it from other tools, in Deanna's words: "The other AIs just spit out text and you have to organise it yourself. This separates the timeline, the notes, the calendar. You can actually move things around."

The modern way to plan a trip is not AI or instinct. It is both, used honestly.

Planning your next trip? Let Eia, Alike's AI trip planner, build the draft. Then take it from there.

About Beyond the Grid

Beyond the Grid is Alike's creator series where real travellers talk about real travel, the missed flights, the wrong turns, the moments that never made the feed. Hosted by Aakash Khanwani and Sneha Chamaria, BTG brings together voices from across the world for conversations that travel content usually avoids.