Planning a Holiday? Airial’s AI Assistant Handles It All in One Click

Planning a holiday often means juggling multiple websites for flights, hotels, transport, and activities—or paying a premium to travel agents. Airial, a travel-tech startup founded by former Meta engineers Archit Karandikar and Sanjeev Shenoy, aims to change that with an AI-powered platform that creates personalised, end-to-end itineraries within seconds. Airial’s platform allows users to input basic travel details—such as starting and ending locations—to instantly generate a complete travel plan. The itinerary covers flights, hotel bookings, local transport, restaurant suggestions, and tourist attractions, all in one place. Travellers can set preferences upfront or tweak the plan after it is generated. Each day’s schedule is clickable, revealing reviews, suggestions, and alternatives, while a map view shows all planned destinations along with transit time, wait periods, and potential day trips. The platform goes beyond standard planning by acting like a digital travel agent, factoring in details such as hotel proximity, transfer times, and transport availability. It also answers destination-specific queries and tailors recommendations to user preferences. To enhance engagement, Airial integrates social media and creator content. Users can link blogs, TikTok videos, or Instagram Reels to add recommended spots directly into their itinerary. The tool can also surface relevant TikTok videos based on a user’s travel destination and preferences. Collaborative features allow friends to share and edit trips, and the platform supports multi-city travel by including cars and buses in its planning options. Karandikar and Shenoy, who were college friends in India before working on AI-based products at Meta, Google, and Waymo, said their shared passion for travel inspired Airial. “Most platforms just help you build a rough plan. We focus on logistics, connecting dozens of APIs and factoring in multiple parameters like transfer time, hotel proximity, and transit availability,” said Karandikar in an interview with TechCrunch. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- KEY HIGHLIGHTS * Startup Overview: AI-driven travel-tech platform offering instant, personalised holiday planning. * Founders: Former Meta engineers Archit Karandikar (ex-Meta, Google, Waymo) and Sanjeev Shenoy (ex-Instagram Reels team). * Core Features: * Generates full itineraries in seconds with flights, hotels, transport, restaurants, and attractions. * Map view with distance and travel time calculations. * Accounts for transit time, wait periods, and nearby day trips. * Social Integration: Users can add travel content from blogs, TikTok, and Instagram Reels to their itinerary; platform surfaces destination-specific creator content. * Collaboration: Enables trip sharing and group planning, supports multi-city travel with cars and buses. * Differentiator: Acts as a detailed digital travel agent, connecting multiple APIs to handle logistics and complex travel parameters.