Why ChatGPT Cannot Replace Travel Agents — Notes from Building the Backend

Every few months a tech publication runs some variant of "ChatGPT will replace travel agents." The argument sounds airtight: travel planning is mostly research, LLMs are great at research, therefore the job is done. I work as a backend developer at MindDMC, an AI itinerary platform built for travel agents and DMCs. When the team started, we tried to build the entire product on top of GPT-4. That approach failed — not because the model was not smart enough, but because we were trying to solve a t...