Hey guys, welcome to my channel. I’m Lauren, and today I’m going to share how to plan your travel if you have food allergies or celiac disease. I just started doing this because we have an upcoming trip to Portugal and Spain in Europe, and it normally takes me so much time to plan out our travel and do a lot of research to find restaurants and places that we can stay.
What I’d love to do is share some of the queries that I use in ChatGPT. So the first thing we’re going to do is give ChatGPT some information about ourselves and our trip. I have celiac disease and I’m allergic to gluten, dairy, and hazelnut. I am traveling to Madrid for three days.
Next, I’m going to ask it for restaurant recommendations starting with breakfast. I’m going to be really specific because ChatGPT does the best when you’re extremely specific. I’m going to say, ‘Give me 10 breakfast recommendations.’
What I would do first is give it some information that I have celiac disease and give it information on all of my allergies. Let it know where I’m traveling and then ask very specifically for recommendations. I’m going to keep in mind when using ChatGPT for this that it has limited knowledge after 2021, so it is possible that things could have closed down. You always want to look up on Google and double-check these before you go.
I also want to ask it a little bit about other meals too. What are the best lunch places? It’s going to give me a recommendation and a little bit of an overview for each, which is nice. I see that there are some repeats from the first list. It’s good to get more than you actually need so you can check if any have closed down.
Then I’m going to ask, ‘What are the best dinner places in Madrid for my allergies?’ Where can I get dessert? It’s giving me some great options here too. So if you’re using ChatGPT to plan your trip, this is where I would start.
Next, I want to ask it to translate some simple phrases I’m going to need at restaurants. If you are going somewhere that they speak a different language, you might want to ask it how to convey your allergies in that language too. How do I say ‘celiac disease’ and ‘I am allergic to gluten, dairy, and hazelnut’? These are going to be great to write down or put on my phone.
You can even ask it about areas to stay in based on your restaurant recommendations above. What area of Madrid should I stay in? Let’s see what it gives us. This is really helpful too. Often when I travel because of food allergies, where we stay is determined based on where we’re going to be eating. If there are limited options in certain areas, it’s great that it tells us. Most of these are located in the central area of Madrid.
We can also ask, ‘Are there any hotels in Madrid that are good with food allergies?’ Especially if you plan on eating some breakfast at the hotels or if you need a snack, it’s great to have a hotel that’s really aware of allergies and can help accommodate as needed.
Another great idea to ask if you enjoy cooking classes would be to say, ‘What cooking classes in Madrid can accommodate food allergies?’ We love cooking classes. We do them everywhere we go, even with all my allergies. I have more allergies, so even with all my allergies, we’ve always been able to find a cooking class in every country we’ve gone to. You can look up which ones tend to accommodate. Probably send any of these an email before I book them too.
Then we can ask, ‘What are must-do activities for me?’ Based on what it knows about me, that I have these food allergies, it should give me recommendations that hopefully don’t interfere with me having food allergies. So for example, the food tour, I could say, ‘Is there a food tour in Madrid that is conscious of food allergies?’
Okay, perfect. This is super helpful. Obviously, you can go with these things, but you see how quickly I’m doing this, and it gives me a quick overview. I don’t have to click into all the pages. This is a really great place to start where it’s helping me minimize the amount of research that I need to do.
Once you have all of these recommendations from ChatGPT and you’ve done your different prompts, you can ask it other things. Of course, these are just what I would recommend asking it as a general rule of thumb when you’re traveling somewhere, especially internationally.
The next step, as I mentioned, would be to determine which of these are most interesting to you, like the recommendations for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and go ahead and type them into Google or TripAdvisor. TripAdvisor is great for international travel. You would type them into TripAdvisor or Google to ensure that they are still open and in business. Then just take a look at the menu. You can send them an email if you have any questions or reach out to them, and that gets you a really great start.
Once you determine that they’re still open, you can add them to your own itinerary. I love to make a Google Sheet itinerary. It is very detailed, very organized because I just love to do that. I love to account for every activity that we want to do and meal. When you’re traveling with food allergies and celiac disease, it can give you a sense of safety and comfort just to know that you have plans for what restaurants can work.
I would highly recommend that because it allows me to just have so much fun when we’re traveling and not worry about am I going to be able to eat today? Where do I find food when I haven’t planned? It turns into a stressful situation, and it doesn’t need to be that. When you’re on vacation, you want to have fun and really enjoy yourself. For me, planning upfront is the best thing that I can do.
Obviously, I’m flexible when I’m there. If we decide that there’s something else we want to do or we hear about a different restaurant that can accommodate, we can switch it up. But at least we have a plan, and we’re good to go.
If you have any questions about how I use ChatGPT to plan for my travel with food allergies or if you just have any questions about what else I do to plan for travel with food allergies, let me know in the comments below. You can subscribe to my channel if you want to see more videos about how I live with celiac disease and thrive with it. And if you want to see vlogs from our travels too. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one!
