I was poking around old folders and found an Excel spreadsheet I’ve kept for years to track work travel. After years as a road warrior, my travel has slowed significantly in a new role. I like the job, but I’ll admit I get a little stir-crazy when I go a month without setting foot on an airplane. Personal and Professional Travel Diary
That spreadsheet made me wonder: what would happen if I fed an LLM a mix of travel records and asked it to build something useful?
In about 30 minutes, I pulled together data from a few sources: spreadsheets, travel apps, hotel history, airline records, calendar entries, and memory. The result is a static HTML travel diary that maps destinations, estimates travel days and mileage, separates personal and professional trips, and even takes a rough pass at cost and carbon footprint.
It’s anonymized, approximate, and probably represents only about 85% of what I could reconstruct with more effort. Travel apps often only go back a few years, but financial records, calendars, social media, photos, and memory can fill in a surprising amount.
What’s interesting to me is the larger idea: a simple app where anyone could upload or paste travel clues and generate a lifetime travel diary. Even if you don’t travel constantly, it could be fun to look back across decades and see where you’ve been, what it cost, and what stories the data reveals.
This is just a quick prototype, but it’s a fun example of what AI can help build from scattered personal data.