23 Comments
User's avatar
Elle's avatar

That mental load is REAL! I can’t even get my husband to look at my beautiful spreadsheets 😭

Also the idea of five to six activities in a day…exhausts me. In practice it would almost certainly end my life!

Henah Velez | Departure's avatar

LOL "my beautiful spreadsheets"

Alexa Spivey's avatar

So thorough as always Henah! Love hearing about new travel tools :) thanks for the helpful insight

Henah Velez | Departure's avatar

<3 Thank you, Alexa!!

Drea Sobieski's avatar

Omg, spending my teenage years teaching myself code just to build Xanga headers and customize MySpace profiles… painfully relatable. Can’t wait to try this.

Henah Velez | Departure's avatar

LOL, I was going for a very niche memory.

Kate Arceo's avatar

This is so helpful, thanks Henah! Also, I too prefer to manually plan our travel, particularly for cross country road trips with our kids. Your newsletter always gets me excited for our upcoming adventures. 🚌

Henah Velez | Departure's avatar

Aw, thank you Kate!! xoxo

The Travel Book Club's avatar

Thanks for the shout! 📚

TriciaGlobalTravel's avatar

As a fellow em dash lover—I will die on this hill—and AI experimenter regarding trip planning—I wrote my article this week about using AI versus human help for trip planning—I really enjoyed this article!

P.S. my “virtual” trip was to Singapore.

Henah Velez | Departure's avatar

I laughed at the em dash use here—perfection. And thank you so much for reading! I'm going to look at your piece too :) x

TriciaGlobalTravel's avatar

What I found interesting was that you started with the human recommendations and then asked AI to synthesize whereas my technique started with AI and then had the human analyze where the gaps were.

Henah Velez | Departure's avatar

I feel like I knew there'd be a ton of AI slop I'd have to go through with a fine tooth comb anyway if that makes sense? So I figured let me start with my usual method and let the AI optimize

Molly's avatar

Perfect timing - also planning on trip to Taipei, HK, and mainland China! I would love to hear more about your research into the 240-hour visa free transit policy. I find it fairly confusing but I'm hoping to make use of it during our trip, so would appreciate any tips!

Henah Velez | Departure's avatar

I actually just drafted a full post on this that I'll be sharing soon! I'm not sure when you're going but I can send it to you earlier if you need. Basically you just have to leave from one country into China and then leave to a different region/country (like HK or Taipei) after within those 10 days!

Molly's avatar

That’s so nice of you! I’m not going until October so should have time :)

Justine A.'s avatar

This came at such a perfect time!! I'm one of the girls that has one too many tabs open all at once whenever planning for travels. Can't wait to try this out. Thanks Henah!!

Henah Velez | Departure's avatar

Thank you bb!! I live by 293203 tabs at once, lol

Emily Edwards's avatar

Yessss love to see an actually useful AI tool 🙌 I'll definitely check it out!!

G Knee's avatar

I just purchased the jacket linked with my credit. I hate how inconsistent their sizing is. I had to size up multiple sizes and get the cropped one because the regular one was too long in the size I needed. It’s incredibly frustrating.

Henah Velez | Departure's avatar

Agreed, I always have to dig. Plus, they don’t have great body diversity in their model photos 🙄