Anyone here actually letting a virtual travel consultant run their life yet? Not “recommend me a cafe in Lisbon” vibes, but a semi-autonomous agent that tracks visas, taxes, weather, AQI, loyalty points, time zones, and personal quirks like “needs a squat rack within 1 km and an espresso that doesn’t taste like regret,” then actually books flights, housing, coworking, eSIMs, onward tickets, and insurance without yeeting you into a Schengen overstay or a 12-hour layover in an airport that thinks chairs are a bourgeois luxury.

I’m toying with building/using one, but before I hand my passport to Skynet, I’d love real-world lessons. Specifically:

Guardrails you use so it doesn’t torch your life savings:
- Approval workflows (diff-based change requests vs “buy now, apologize later”).
- Virtual cards with per-merchant limits, refundable-rates-only policy, auto-cancel windows.
- “Safe harbor” defaults: if confidence < X, book a 2-week buffer in a known-good city.
- Double-check pattern: two engines plan; if outputs diverge by Y%, escalate to human.
Edge cases that wrecked your bot or your sanity:
- Schengen 90/180 math when microstates and overnight trains happen.
- Transit visa traps (hello, LHR + checked bags + wrong passport).
- Daylight savings flipping check-in/out math on border days.
- Onward ticket proof, cash-only VOAs, passport blank-page requirements.
- SIM registration requiring local ID; “pet-friendly” meaning “if your pet is a cactus.”
Data and stack that actually works:
- Flight/hotel APIs that don’t rate-limit you into oblivion (Amadeus, Duffel, Kiwi, etc.).
- Calendar/email scraping to auto-assemble proof-of-accommodation and onward travel.
- Housing: long-stay discovery, cancellation-risk scoring, noise prediction from maps/POI (how are you inferring “techno o’clock” from street data?).
- Health/seasonality: pollen, AQI, dengue season, surf season, gym density, cowork latency.
Evaluation and red-teaming:
- Your “Nomad Gauntlet” test itinerary and scoring metrics (cost, carbon, schedule slack, visa/tax compliance, cancellation risk, jet lag).
- How you detect hallucinated fare classes and phantom award space.
- Confidence thresholds: at what predicted pain level does a human intervene?
Legal, financial, and insurance gotchas:
- At what point does this become a regulated “travel agency” in your jurisdiction?
- EU261 automation for delays; chargeback strategy when an OTA ghosts you.
- Liability: who eats the cost if the bot “optimizes” you into a nonrefundable fever dream?
Security and privacy (AKA “please don’t leak my passport to a toaster”):
- Local vs cloud models for PII; secret management; hardware keys; audit logs.
- Sanitizing uploads: redacting MRZ data except when strictly needed.
- Device loss plan: remote wipe, vault sharding, travel doc dead-man switch.
Loyalty and points without summoning a gremlin:
- Award search APIs/tools that are scriptable and not pure pain.
- Mixed-cabin shenanigans detection; transfer partner timing; auto-hold strategies.
- Status pursuit without boiling the planet or your will to live.
Failure handling (because travel):
- Airline meltdown playbooks: re-accommodation trees, IRROPS triggers, “accept fare difference” thresholds.
- Housing scams and last-minute rebook bots with verified inventory.
- Local holidays/strikes that turn “short hop” into “weekend camping at gate B32.”
Pets/companions:
- Pet passport flows, breed restrictions, heat embargoes, and how your bot knows “pet policy” ≠ “emotional support tarantulas welcome.”

Also curious about ethics:

Neighborhood impact scoring so it doesn’t funnel us all into the same gentrifying bubble.
Carbon budgets as a first-class constraint, not a guilty afterthought.

If you’ve built one:

What stack? Agents? Workflow orchestrators? Any open-source templates?
One thing it nailed and one thing it hilariously misunderstood. Examples encouraged, like “it booked ‘beachfront coworking’ which turned out to be a cabana and my laptop now tastes like sea salt.”

I want something that knows “fast Wi‑Fi” isn’t a router under a couch, “AC” isn’t a decorative fan, and “walkable” doesn’t involve parkour. If this is a terrible plan, please talk me out of giving a robot a spending limit and a dream. If it’s viable, show me your guardrails, test sets, and horror stories.