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January 8, 2026 • 5 min read

How to Plan a Trip from TikTok Travel Videos

You've saved 47 TikToks about Lisbon. Now what?

We've all been there. You're scrolling at midnight, saving every "hidden gem in Barcelona" and "places tourists don't know about" video. Your saved folder is chaos. Hundreds of clips with no way to actually use them.

Then you book a trip and realize: now I need to turn this into an actual plan.

The Problem With TikTok Travel Content

TikTok is great for discovery. It's terrible for planning.

  • Videos don't tell you where places actually are
  • Locations are often wrong or vague ("somewhere in Rome")
  • No way to organize by neighborhood or day
  • You have to re-watch every video to remember what it was about
  • Half the places are closed or don't exist anymore

The gap between "I saved this" and "I can actually go here" is massive.

The Manual Way (What Most People Do)

  1. Watch each saved video
  2. Try to figure out the location from comments or captions
  3. Google the place name
  4. Add it to Google Maps or a spreadsheet
  5. Repeat 50 times
  6. Try to organize by neighborhood
  7. Give up and wing it

This takes hours. Most people never actually do it. They arrive at their destination with a folder of unsorted videos and the vague hope they'll remember something.

The Faster Way: AI Trip Planners

A new category of apps can now take social media links and extract the locations automatically.

Here's how it works:

  1. Paste the TikTok link into the app
  2. AI analyzes the video — audio, visuals, captions, comments
  3. Locations are extracted and placed on a map
  4. You organize into an itinerary by day or neighborhood

What used to take hours now takes minutes.

What to Look for in a Trip Planner

Not all trip planning apps handle social media well. Here's what matters:

  • TikTok support. Some apps only work with Instagram or YouTube.
  • Accuracy. Does it actually find the right location, or just guess?
  • Map view. You need to see where things are relative to each other.
  • Itinerary builder. Extracted locations are useless without organization.
  • Offline access. You'll need this when you're actually traveling.

How We Built Polo for This

Full disclosure: I'm biased. But this is literally why we built Polo.

Paste a TikTok link. We analyze the video with AI—not just the caption, but the actual content. We cross-reference with Google Maps to verify locations exist and are correct.

The places land on a map. You drag them into days. Done.

Works with Instagram Reels and YouTube too. Same process.

Tips for Using TikTok for Trip Planning

  • Save more than you'll use. Half won't pan out. That's fine.
  • Check dates. That restaurant from 2021 might be closed.
  • Verify locations. Creators get things wrong. Google it.
  • Look for locals, not influencers. Actual residents know better spots.
  • Export your saves before you travel. You might not have good internet there.

The Bottom Line

TikTok changed how we discover travel destinations. The planning tools just needed to catch up.

Whether you use Polo or something else, stop manually transcribing video captions into spreadsheets. It's 2026. There's a better way.

Try Polo free. Paste a TikTok link and see your saved spots on a map in seconds.