How to Create a Travel Guide with AI (Watch a Week in the South of France Become a Book in 8 Minutes)

James is going to the south of France for a week, and he wants a guide he can take with him. In the video above he makes one: he chooses the Travel guide tile, types "a week in the south of France for couples", keeps the recommended eight chapters, prunes the plan to seven, writes the book, gives it an illustrated AI cover and opens the export dialog, all in under eight minutes. This page follows every step, explains what the travel format puts in each chapter and why the books come out longer than the estimate on screen, and publishes the numbers from the 654 travel guides people have made on Inkfluence AI so far. The full transcript is further down.

What the video covers, in order

1. Narrow the focus: a destination, a trip length and a kind of traveller
2. New Book, then the Travel guide tile and its quick examples
3. The prompt: a week in the south of France for couples
4. Eight chapters recommended, and the estimate under the slider
5. Quality or Speed, and why James picks Speed for the video
6. The plan: delete a chapter, move chapters, add one, up to 40
7. Write the book: seven chapters from the plan and its summaries
8. Editing chapters with AI, regenerating or deleting them
9. Edit cover: upload, stock image, or an Illustrated AI cover from a prompt
10. Preview, then export: PDF settings, KDP package, EPUB, DOCX, audiobook
11. Where it can go: Etsy, Gumroad, Amazon, or in your pocket on the trip

Why narrow the focus before you type anything?

James's first minute is advice, not clicks, and it is the advice that decides whether anyone chooses your guide. "Travel guide alone is way too broad." Pick a specific destination, a trip length, or a kind of traveller, ideally all three. His examples are "3 days in Lisbon on a budget" and "the solo traveler's guide to Kyoto", and both work for the same reason: a reader planning that trip sees their own trip in the title. A generic guide to Portugal competes with every guidebook ever printed; a three-day budget guide to Lisbon competes with almost nothing, because it answers a question the big guides spread across forty pages.

He also names who the format suits: travel creators, bloggers and local businesses, for whom a guide is a way to build authority. A travel blogger has the posts already and the guide gathers them into something a reader can take along. A local business, a guesthouse, a tour operator, a café on the right street, can hand a guide to guests or give it away for an email address, and it is the most useful thing a guest could be given on arrival. The data below shows people already narrowing in the way James describes: of the 654 travel guides made on the platform so far, 123 said budget, cheap or backpacking in the title or brief, 54 were for families, 37 for solo travellers and 29 for couples or honeymooners, and 105 named a trip length.

The three parts of the brief do different jobs. The destination sets the chapters, because the travel format gives every chapter its own place. The trip length sets how many places are realistic: a week in the south of France is six or eight towns, a weekend in Lisbon is four or five neighbourhoods. The traveller sets the tone and the picks, which is why "for couples" in James's prompt matters: it tilts the restaurants towards a table for two and the evenings towards a terrace rather than a hostel bar. Add a budget ("on a mid-range budget") or a focus ("for people who want to walk everywhere") and the plan will carry that through every chapter too.

What does the Travel guide screen ask for?

From New Book, James picks the Travel guide tile, which the app describes as itineraries, city guides and trip planning. The next screen asks one question, where you are taking readers, with the prompt "the place, and the kind of trip it is". Three quick examples sit under the box for anyone who wants to start from one: a five-day Lisbon itinerary with food, views and hidden gems; a budget backpacking guide to Southeast Asia; a local-favourites city guide to Tokyo for first-timers. Every one of them is the shape James just described: a place, a length or a traveller, and an angle.

He types his own instead, and it is shorter than any of the examples: "a week in the south of France for couples". That is enough. The app does not need the list of towns or the restaurants; it needs to know where, how long and for whom, and it plans the rest. If you do have towns in mind, name them ("Nice, Antibes, Aix-en-Provence and the Luberon") and the plan will use them rather than choose its own. If you want the guide in another language, type the brief in that language; one in six travel guides on the platform has been written in a language other than English.

How many chapters should a travel guide have?

The slider recommends eight for a travel guide, and James keeps it. Eight is a good default because of how the travel format plans a book: every chapter covers a different place. For a country or region guide each chapter is a city or an area; for a single-city guide each chapter is a district or a neighbourhood. The most visited place comes first, so the reader who only has one day reads chapter one, and the last chapter is often a day trip or somewhere quieter. Chapter titles name the place, so the table of contents doubles as the route.

So the honest way to choose the number is to count the places. A long weekend in one city is four to six neighbourhoods. A week across a region is six to eight towns, which is what James's prompt produces. A two-week country guide might be ten to twelve regions. Paid plans allow up to 40 chapters in the plan, which is far more than a travel guide needs; the free plan writes up to five chapters a book, which is exactly a weekend city guide. That limit shows up clearly in the data: of the 648 travel guides with chapters written, 455 have five or fewer, 107 have exactly eight, and 44 run past twenty, the regional and country guides.

Under the slider the app shows an estimate for the chosen length. For eight chapters it reads 4,400 to 6,000 words and roughly 18 to 24 pages, which is what James reads out. It is a general estimate that applies to most books. Travel guides come out longer, as the next section and the numbers further down show.

Quality or Speed?

On a paid plan the same screen offers a generation mode. Quality is described in the app as the best structure and depth, slightly slower; Speed as faster generation with concise output. James picks Speed so the video does not have to wait. For a guide someone will travel on, pick Quality: the depth is the tables, the prices and the second restaurant, and those are what a reader paid for. Quality is also the default, and free accounts, which do not see the toggle, write in it. Of the 612 travel guides on the platform with a recorded writing run, 609 were written in Quality and 3 in Speed. Speed earns its place when you are testing whether a destination has enough in it for a full guide before you commit to one.

What can you change in the plan before it is written?

Click Generate my book and the app plans the guide first: a card for each chapter with its title and a summary of what it will cover. The screen is titled "Here's your plan", and it says what to do with it: rename, reorder or remove chapters, because every chapter is written to match. James does exactly that. He looks down the list, decides one chapter is not a place he wants to go, and deletes it. He shows that you can drag chapters into a different order, and that Add chapter puts a new one in if the plan missed somewhere. His plan goes from eight chapters to seven, and the counter under the list shows how many you have against the limit, 40 on a paid plan.

Treat this screen as the route. Read the chapter titles in order and ask whether that is the order you would travel in. If the guide is for a week on the road, the chapters should follow the road: Nice, then Antibes, then inland, not back and forth. If a place is on the list that your readers would skip, delete it now; if the place you most want in the book is missing, add a chapter and name it in the title. Rename a chapter to put the angle in it ("Aix-en-Provence for two: markets, fountains and a long lunch") and the chapter will be written to that angle. None of this uses your allowance. Changing the plan is free; only writing counts.

Then Write the book. The app takes the prompt, the chapter titles and the summaries and writes the chapters from them; James sits back while it works, which takes a couple of minutes for his seven. Non-fiction chapters are written at the same time rather than one after another, so a longer guide does not take proportionally longer.

What goes into each chapter?

James scrolls the finished book and says it has different types of content within it, and that is the part of the travel format worth understanding before you edit anything. A travel guide chapter is not an essay about a place. It is a set of practical sections, and the layout rotates from chapter to chapter so that eight chapters do not read as eight copies of one template. Across a book you will see these shapes:

Two rules sit behind all of it. Every chapter names specific places, with addresses, prices or hours, rather than telling the reader to "research restaurants", and advice generic enough to apply to any destination is left out; even the packing list is for that place. That is why the chapters are long. A section with a comparison table, five named restaurants with dishes and prices, and a packing list is simply more words than a section of prose, and it is why the eight-chapter guides people have made run at about 1,900 words a chapter (a median of 15,487 words over eight) rather than the 550 to 750 the on-screen estimate assumes.

How long should a travel guide ebook be?

That is longer than most people expect from the estimate, and it changes two things. The first is the price: a 15,000-word guide with tables for every town is a substantial product, closer to a short printed guidebook than to a blog post in PDF form, and it can be priced like one. The second is the edit. Fifteen thousand words of practical detail is an evening of checking, not ten minutes, and the checking is the part that makes the guide trustworthy.

Short is fine when the trip is short. A five-chapter weekend guide, one chapter per neighbourhood, is a complete product for a city break and is the length the free plan writes. Longer is fine when the trip is: the 44 guides on the platform with more than twenty chapters are the country and regional guides, where every region is its own chapter. What does not work is padding. If you have run out of places, the guide is finished; add a chapter only when there is somewhere new to send the reader. The written travel guide walkthrough goes further into formats, from weekend planners to country overviews.

Check every price, time and address

James reviews the chapter titles before writing and says he will review the content afterwards, and for a travel guide that second review is not optional. The travel format asks for real, named places with prices, opening hours and costs, because a guide without them is useless. That is exactly the kind of detail that goes out of date, and an AI draft can state it confidently and wrongly. A restaurant that closed last year, a museum that now shuts on Tuesdays, a bus that became a tram: none of those is visible from the page.

The fastest way through it is one pass per chapter with a map open. For each named place, search it, confirm it exists and is open, and correct the price and hours from its own website. Where you cannot confirm a figure, replace it with a range or remove it. Where you know better from having been there, say so in your own words, because a line of first-hand experience ("go at nine, before the tour buses") is worth more than any number. If you are writing for sale, put the date you checked the details at the front of the book. Readers forgive a price that has moved since then; they do not forgive a restaurant that never existed.

Editing the chapters

When the book is written, James shows the two ways to finish. If you are happy with it, download it. If not, edit. Each chapter opens in the editor, where the AI assistant can proofread, rewrite, shorten or expand a passage, and where you can type directly. From the chapters list you can add a chapter, regenerate a chapter with AI (with an undo if you liked the old one better), or delete one. For a travel guide the useful edits are practical: turn the busiest table into two if it will not fit a phone screen, add the photo you took of the view, rewrite the opening of each chapter in your own voice so the guide sounds like someone who has been there. The book editor page shows the assistant in more detail.

Which cover works for a travel guide?

Click Edit cover and the video walks all three routes. Upload an image, which is the right choice if you have a photo from the trip, because a real photo is the strongest signal that the author has been there. Choose a stock image, which is what the book had before James changed it. Or generate an AI cover: he chooses Illustrated, gives the prompt "a week in southern France", clicks Generate cover, and has a painted cover within a couple of minutes. If it is not right, pick another style and generate again; when one works, apply it to the book and save.

The styles matter more for travel than for most books, because a travel cover has one job: say the place at thumbnail size. The cover editor offers ten, and among them Photographic (a realistic cinematic photo), Editorial (clean magazine-cover energy), Illustrated (hand-drawn watercolour, the one James uses) and Vintage, which the app describes as a sun-faded retro travel poster and which suits a travel guide better than almost any other kind of book. Of the 73 travel guides on the platform with an AI cover so far, 33 used Editorial and 31 Photographic, 4 Vintage and 2 Illustrated. AI covers come with the paid plans' monthly allowance, and credits buy more. The AI book cover generator page has the full style guide.

Preview and export

With the cover applied, James previews the travel guide and says what the preview is for: seeing that the content is clean, page by page, before anyone else does. Then the export dialog. For a PDF you can set the page size and content, switch decorative elements on or off, adjust the branding, the header, footer and copyright, and add an author section with your name and a short bio. The same dialog exports a KDP package (the interior PDF and a full wrap cover with the spine sized to your page count), an EPUB, a DOCX, or turns the book into an audiobook.

Choose by where the guide is going. A PDF is the right file for a phone on the trip, for Etsy and Gumroad, and for a lead magnet. EPUB is for Kindle and the other ebook stores, where readers expect reflowable text. The KDP package is for a paperback, which for a travel guide is worth it only if you are confident of the details, because a printed price cannot be corrected. DOCX is for handing the guide to an editor or a designer. The free plan exports PDF; the KDP package, EPUB and DOCX come with the paid plans or credits. Of the 307 travel guides exported so far, the last export was a PDF for 247, an EPUB for 44 and a DOCX for 16. The guide to PDF, EPUB and DOCX covers the differences in full.

The audiobook is the one to think about for travel. A guide read aloud is something to listen to on the train into a new city. Tables do not read well aloud, since a narrator reads them cell by cell, so if you plan an audio edition, turn the two or three busiest tables into sentences first. Creator includes 15 narrated chapters a month and Premium 30; the ebook to audiobook walkthrough shows the steps.

Build a brief in the shape James uses

A place, a trip length and a traveller, with a budget and a focus if they matter. Fill them in and the brief writes itself, with a chapter count to set on the slider. The button opens the dashboard with the brief already in the box.

Six travel guide briefs in the shape of the video's, and what each one plans

Place, length, traveller, and one angle. Each of these is one line, and each maps to a plan the way "a week in the south of France for couples" mapped to a chapter per town.

1. "3 days in Lisbon on a budget." James's first example. Five chapters, one per neighbourhood (Baixa and Chiado, Alfama, Belém, Príncipe Real, a day trip to Sintra), each with free sights, cheap places to eat and the tram or walk between them.
2. "The solo traveller's guide to Kyoto." His second. The traveller sets the picks: counter seats rather than tables for four, hostels and small inns with single rooms, the quiet temples at opening time, and a safety note per district.
3. "A week in Andalusia by train, with no car needed, for first-time visitors." The focus fixes the route: Seville, Córdoba, Granada, Málaga, Ronda, each chapter starting with how to get there from the last.
4. "A long weekend in Edinburgh for families with young children." The traveller changes every table: family rooms, rainy-day indoor options, where to eat with a pushchair, and how far each sight is on small legs.
5. "Our town for guests: a guide from the guesthouse on the harbour, walking distance only." The local business version. Every chapter is a street or a stretch of coast within a walk of the door, and the book goes in every room or in the booking email. For a holiday let, the guest guidebook maker plans this split for you: the local chapters written from one line, the house pages (getting in, wifi, rules, check-out) typed by the host.
6. "Two weeks in Vietnam, north to south, on a mid-range budget." The long version: twelve chapters from Hanoi to the Mekong Delta, with the overnight train or the short flight between each, and a budget table per stop.

What does not work is a brief with no traveller and no length. "A guide to France" gives the plan nothing to decide with; it will choose Paris, the Riviera and the Loire, and every chapter will be written for nobody in particular. Add who and how long, and the same destination becomes a book with a reader.

Five mistakes particular to travel guides

1. A destination with no traveller. "A guide to Italy" is every guide to Italy. Say who is going and for how long, as James does, and the plan has something to decide with.
2. Publishing without checking. Prices, hours and closures are the details readers act on and the details an AI draft is most likely to get wrong or out of date. Check each one, and date the book.
3. A plan that zigzags. The chapters are the route. If the order sends a reader back and forth across the region, drag them into the order you would travel before you click Write the book.
4. Printing too soon. A paperback cannot be corrected when a restaurant closes. Sell the PDF or the ebook first, update it for a season, then consider print.
5. A cover that does not say the place. At thumbnail size a travel cover has one job. Use your own photo, or a Photographic or Vintage AI cover with the place in the prompt.

Full video transcript

Lightly punctuated and cleaned of speech-to-text slips (product and format names, a repeated word); the wording is as spoken.

Travel guide FAQ

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