- Scott Lengel, a former Microsoft CTO, launched an AI-powered RV road trip planner, AdventureGenie.
- He said when he got into RVing during the pandemic, he couldn't find a great planning tool.
- AdventureGenie recommends custom routes, campsites, and activities based on user preferences.
Scott Lengel and his wife, Lisa, were Marriott people.
After spending 23 years as a CTO at Microsoft, Lengel retired in 2017, at which point he and his wife knew they wanted to travel the world. They visited places like Cambodia, Vietnam, and India, typically traveling by plane and staying in hotels — often Marriotts.
Then the pandemic hit.
Suddenly, they were stuck at home in South Carolina. That's when the couple realized, "We really haven't seen the good old US of A."
Up until that point, they'd never even been camping.
"We figured if ever there was a time to go RVing, to go camping, this would be it," Lengel told Business Insider.
So they rented an RV and set off for Nashville with a couple of good friends. "We just had a blast," Lengel said. "Hanging around the campsite and the campfire and eating and beverages, and just the camaraderie. We just fell in love with the lifestyle of camping in one week."
Within six months, they purchased an RV of their own and started taking it all over. But when the couple tried to plan a six-week, multi-stop road trip to the national parks of the Southwest, they realized it was actually pretty challenging and that the existing resources were not great.
"There has to be a better way," they thought.
A couple of years later, in May 2023, Lengel launched AdventureGenie — an AI-powered RV trip planner. Lengel, who serves as chairman and CEO, said that in less than a year, AdventureGenie has attracted more than 10,000 users, and not just RVers, but also people traveling in cars on all kinds of road trips.
AI can customize trip planning
AdventureGenie is one of many AI-powered trip-planning tools that have popped up over the past couple of years. It's been featured on lists of the best RV- and road-trip planning AI tools.
AdventureGenie is set up to help people plan their trips in three phases, which Lengel said was based on talking to thousands of people about how they plan their trips.
First, you can shape your trip. You can tell AdventureGenie things like where you want to start, where you want to end, how many miles you want to drive in a day, and any places you know you want to stop along the way. AdventureGenie will create a custom route based on your preferences and what the program knows about you, either from what you've told it or from past trips you've planned.
Second, you can select your campsites. AdventureGenie uses AI to compile information about campsites and make recommendations based on your preferences. In addition to generating an overall score on a campsite, AdventureGenie also generates a score that is unique to you, indicating how likely a specific campground is to meet your personal needs.
Third, is finding things to do. For instance, if it knows you like eating at local restaurants, hiking, and biking, as Lengel and his wife do, it can point out those attractions.
The biggest thing AI brings to AdventureGenie's trip planning is the customization, Lengel said. Instead of looking up a generic road trip planner that is the first hit served to everyone on Google, AdventureGenie can create itineraries that are unique to you.
"It feels as if you have a copilot or a travel planner sitting by your side and knows what you're looking for and customizes it for you," Lengel said.
He said that when RVers first use AdventureGenie the "jaw-dropping" moment for them is when it fills in the blanks on a trip with stops along the way.
In the past, if you wanted to road trip from South Carolina to Yellowstone, you'd have to look at a map and try to plot out stops based on how many miles a day you want to drive. But you'd also have to manually figure out whether those stops have campsites that suit your needs, or if they have any other attractions that make them worth passing through, or how far off the highway they are.
Lengel said new AdventureGenie users often say it saves them so much time planning their trip just by filling in their route.
"That's pretty darn rewarding for us," he said.
From Microsoft to tech startup
Lengel, who came out of retirement to launch AdventureGenie, said working on this startup has been a major change of pace from his days at Microsoft, which he also loved.
"We're a startup at our core, and it's a lot different than when I was working for an organization that had 150,000 employees and an incredible budget," he said. "We all wear lots of hats, which has been exciting, thrilling, and even challenging from time to time."
These days, he and his wife are on the road three out of four weeks a month, though now it's usually for work, visiting trade shows and meeting with RV user groups.
However, they do still make a point to do some fun things, too.
When Lengel spoke to BI, he was sitting in his RV in the Florida Keys, with a view of the ocean right out his window.