Using AI to ensure smooth, untroubled Easter family holidays

So we're in the home stretch, Good Friday being around the corner along with the term break. If you're lucky enough to have departed for holidays last weekend, congrats to you. You'll have gone through the packing lists, checked passport expirations, visas, on arrival declarations, got to the airport, checked in, not lost a child, yelled at said child/s numerous times to come here / don't touch that, got on the plane, apologised to other plane passengers, arrived, gone through customs, found luggage, figured out transport to accommodation, checked in, cracked open that first ceremonial arrival beverage, all so you can finally "relax", and 5 minutes later one of the kids yells "My room doesn't have WiFi!!!"...

Hardly trouble free. So has AI come up with something better, you wonder?

If you were expecting a miracle, I lied, the article title was clickbait (hah!). BECAUSE A SMOOTH, UNTROUBLED EASTER FAMILY HOLIDAY DOES NOT EXIST. Did you really think GPT, CoPilot or Claude could magically wave away that unique and special holiday stress? Lovely thought, but we're not quite there yet.

What has changed is the distance between planning and doing. Last Easter, you could ask an LLM to draft your itinerary, suggest restaurants, map out activities. In 2026, you can hand it the whole brief and tools like Co-work or Perplexity Computer will make the actual bookings. Or if you've really gone down the rabbit hole, you've built your own OpenClaw travel agent and it's managing the whole thing while you sleep. The gap between "here's a suggestion" and "done, confirmed, reference number in your inbox" has closed faster than most people realise.

My favourite recent example: needed to book a local Japanese restaurant, no English website, no online reservations. Called up, used Google Live Translate in real time, got through the whole conversation, table booked. Bob's your uncle.

Unfortunately, with the access to information available, our expectations will only go up - we know too much. The spontaneity will be lost as we'll be focused on whether to go to this 4.5 rated attraction versus that 4.6 rated one instead. IG filters are amazing things, so amazing in fact that reality often is a letdown.

The advice? You're on holiday, so give the digital stuff a rest. Getting lost is ok. Not knowing what's on the menu is ok. Paying the occasional "tourist fee" is ok.

That way, when you return home relaxed, over-fed and too many naps banked, you can open your laptop and smile at yourself, whispering to GPT "I did it without you."