How we verify every venue

The problem: AI makes places up

Large language models are trained on old, blended text — travel blogs, listicles, forum threads — and they generate the shape of a plausible answer whether or not the underlying fact is still true, or was ever true. Aggregator sites make this worse: a chain quietly drops a location from its own site, but three travel blogs and two “best of” roundups still list it by name, and the model learned from all five.

This week alone, checking a batch of AI-generated itineraries against real sources turned up three ordinary examples — nothing exotic, exactly the kind of venue a generic planner names by default:

• A Waikiki restaurant still listed by several review aggregators, even though the chain's own site had quietly dropped that location.
• An Amsterdam museum that has been closed since 2020, but that generic travel guides still recommend by name.
• A well-known bar whose own operator site still listed a location that actually closed in 2024.

What we actually do

Before a venue goes into a WonderKit itinerary — one of our pre-made plans, or one you build yourself — it goes through a verification check, not just a name generator:

• Checked against a live source. Every venue is confirmed against the operator's own site or listings dated within the last few months — not a five-year-old blog post.
• Closed venues are named as closed. When a place has shut down, we say so rather than silently dropping it from the plan or silently keeping it in.
• Volatile details point at the source, not a stale number. Hours, prices, and reservation rules change often, so we point you at the operator's own page instead of printing a figure we can't keep current.
• Honest seasonality. What's shut for the winter, what needs a reservation weeks out, what's only open on weekends — stated plainly, not glossed over.
• No confirmation, no listing. When a venue can't be confirmed against a real, current source, it doesn't go on the plan. We'd rather show fewer stops than show one that doesn't exist.

What that means for you

It means the plan in front of you is made of places you can actually walk into. Not a lucky guess that happened to work out, and not marketing copy dressed up as a recommendation — a deliberate check against a source that's still standing behind the venue today. That's not a promise that nothing will ever change between when we check and when you travel — venues close, hours shift — but it's a very different starting point from a model confidently sending you to a restaurant that stopped existing years ago.