Tour Guide: The Free AI Itinerary Builder We Built for South Georgia

By Ricky Browning — June 2026

You know that moment when someone visiting from out of town asks you what there is to do around Valdosta — or you find yourself in an unfamiliar town with a few hours to kill and no idea where to start? We’ve all been there. Google gives you a wall of chain restaurants and TripAdvisor lists that feel like they were written by an algorithm pulling from a national template. What you actually want is a local who knows the area well enough to say: “You’ve got three hours and you like history? Here’s exactly where to go and in what order.”

That’s what we built. Tour Guide is the newest free app in the riktom.com suite, and it does exactly one thing very well: you tell it where you are, how long you have, and what kind of trip you’re in the mood for — then it hands you a timed, ordered itinerary of real nearby places, complete with start times, descriptions, practical tips, and a “take me there” Google Maps link for every stop.

No account. No sign-up. No ads on the app. Just a plan.

Three steps, done in under a minute

We kept the flow as simple as we could. There are exactly three decisions to make before the itinerary appears.

Step 1: Where are you? Tap “Use my location” and the app reads your GPS coordinates (with your permission) and reverse-geocodes them to a place name — so you’ll see something like “Exploring near Valdosta, Georgia” confirmed on screen before you proceed. If you’d rather not share location, or if you’re planning ahead for a trip, just type a town or ZIP in the search box. “Valdosta, GA,” “31601,” “Tifton” — they all work. The app uses free, no-key geocoding through Open-Meteo and OpenStreetMap, so there’s no third-party API key required on the visitor’s end, and nothing stored.

Step 2: How long do you have? Five time chips: 1 hour, 2 hours, 3 hours, half-day (4 hours), or full day (8 hours). Tap the one that fits, and the AI calibrates the number of stops and total walk time accordingly. A one-hour slot gets you one or two tight stops. A full day builds a proper circuit. The app defaults to 3 hours — a useful afternoon window — and remembers your preference for next time.

Step 3: What are you in the mood for? This is where it gets interesting. Five trip vibes to choose from, and the key word is choose — you can pick more than one.

• 🏛️ History of the area — historic sites, landmarks, monuments, museums, old downtowns
• 👪 Family-friendly — parks, playgrounds, easy walks, family dining, kid-appropriate stops
• 🍻 College / Nightlife (21+) — bars, breweries, live music, late-night eats, social spots
• 🍴 Foodie & local eats — restaurants, cafes, coffee shops, bakeries, local specialties
• 🌲 Outdoors, history & culture — parks, trails, river spots, nature, landmarks, and cultural sites

There’s also an optional “Traveling with young kids” toggle that makes sure every stop on the route is genuinely child-appropriate and safe for little legs.

Once all three steps are set, hit “Build my itinerary” and the AI goes to work. It usually comes back in under ten seconds.

Multi-select: the blended itinerary

One of the things we added — and one of the things that makes Tour Guide actually useful rather than just clever — is the ability to pick multiple vibes at once. The persona buttons are toggles, not radio buttons. Tap History. Tap Foodie. Both stay selected, highlighted in green, and the AI builds a single cohesive route that weaves both together.

In practice, that gives you something like this for a history-plus-foodie afternoon in Valdosta: the Lowndes County Historical Museum to start (a genuine gem of local archives and artifacts), a walk through the Downtown Historic District to take in the architecture, a stop at The Bistro for lunch, and then Gud Coffee to close the loop. Each stop has a type badge, a “why this place” description, an estimated duration, the neighborhood it’s in, a practical tip (parking, best time to visit, what to order), and the Maps link.

The blending works because the AI prompt is explicit: it doesn’t just stack “history stops” and then “food stops” back to back. It’s told to weave the interests into one cohesive route and to order the stops as a sensible geographic loop rather than a random scatter. That matters more than it sounds when you’re the one actually driving between them.

Real itineraries, real Valdosta

We tested Tour Guide extensively before launching, and the results across different configurations were genuinely encouraging. A few examples from Valdosta that came back during testing:

These aren’t invented. Every one of those is a real place you can walk into tomorrow. The AI is grounded by your actual GPS coordinates and explicitly instructed to suggest only places it is confident genuinely exist at that location. That doesn’t mean it’s infallible — more on the disclaimer in a moment — but it means you’re not getting “The Sunny Diner (fictional)” on your route.

The app also works outside Valdosta. Test it in Tifton, Douglas, Moultrie, or anywhere along the I-75 corridor through South Georgia, and you’ll get a different set of local stops calibrated to that community. Take it to Savannah, to Atlanta, or to somewhere you’ve never been — same flow, same quality.

The AI under the hood

For the technically curious: Tour Guide is powered by Google Gemini 2.5 Flash, accessed through a dedicated API key we set up specifically for this app. One of our design principles for the riktom.com suite is that each backend service uses its own isolated key — so this app can never accidentally drain another app’s quota, and its key can be rotated independently if needed. The backend is a small FastAPI service that runs on the VPS, reverse-proxied through nginx, so the key never touches the browser.

The prompt we send the model is structured to return strict JSON — every stop in a fixed shape with name, type, why-visit description, duration estimate, area, tip, and a Google Maps search query — so the frontend can render it reliably. A short-lived in-memory cache means repeated requests for the same location, time, and vibes within a six-hour window return instantly without burning additional API calls. There’s also a light per-IP rate limit to keep things fair.

The frontend is static HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript — no framework, no build step, no tracking beyond the Google Analytics tag that runs across all riktom.com pages. It loads fast, works on any phone or desktop, and remembers your last time preference and persona selections in local storage so you don’t have to re-tap them every visit.

About the AI disclaimer

We built Tour Guide to be genuinely useful, and being genuinely useful means being honest about what AI can and can’t do. Every itinerary the app generates comes with a footer note: these are AI-suggested places, and hours, seasons, prices, and details change. Always confirm before you go.

Every stop also has an “Open in Maps ↗” link that opens a Google Maps search for that place by name and city, so you can see it on a map, check the current hours, read the reviews, and confirm it’s what you’re looking for before you drive across town. Think of Tour Guide as a very well-read local who makes strong suggestions — you still glance at the place’s hours before showing up at the door.

AI-generated itineraries aren’t a replacement for local knowledge, and we’d never pretend otherwise. What they are is a fast, surprisingly good starting point that saves you twenty minutes of searching and puts real options in front of you in a sensible order. Use it as a scaffold and adjust from there.

How it fits the riktom.com suite

Tour Guide is the twentieth app in the riktom.com suite, and it slots in naturally alongside a few others we’ve built for the region. If you’re planning a family outing, pair it with Family Fun Finder, which pulls a curated list of kid-friendly spots and events around South Georgia. If you’re planning around the weather, the Hunt & Fish Forecast can tell you whether conditions are lining up for your outdoor stops, and Storm Desk keeps an eye on afternoon thunderstorms that might reshuffle your plans. If you want to end the day under a dark sky, our Night Sky guide tells you the best spots and conditions for stargazing once the sun goes down.

Where those other apps give you live data — river levels, weather alerts, forecast conditions — Tour Guide gives you the narrative layer: a structured suggestion for how to spend the time between now and whenever you need to be somewhere. They complement each other well.

What’s coming next

The core app is working well and already earning its place in the suite, but there are natural directions to take it. A few things on the list:

Right now, Tour Guide relies entirely on the AI’s training data for place recommendations. A future version could ground it more deeply in real local data — pulling from community-submitted tips via Field Reports, for example, or weighing in known events and seasonal conditions. The AI handles the “where” and “why”; local signal would make the “right now” sharper.

We’re also thinking about shareable itineraries — a way to generate a link you can text to a friend rather than having to describe the plan over the phone. And on the family side, a pre-loaded list of known family-friendly venues for the South Georgia area could help the app punch above its weight when suggesting stops for young kids in smaller towns.

For now, the app is live, free, and ready to put to work. If you try it and get an itinerary that surprises you — or one that misses the mark — we’d genuinely like to hear about it. Hit the Contact page or use the Suggest an Idea form and tell us what you found.

Common Questions

What is the riktom.com Tour Guide?

Tour Guide (tour.riktom.com) is a free AI-powered itinerary builder for the riktom.com suite. You tell it where you are, how long you have, and what kind of trip you want — history, family-friendly, nightlife, foodie, or outdoors — and it returns a timed, ordered list of nearby stops with real places, start times, Google Maps links, and tips for each stop. No account or sign-up required.

Is Tour Guide really free?

Yes — completely free to use, with no account, no sign-up, and no ads on the app itself. It’s one of more than 20 free tools in the riktom.com suite.

Can I combine trip types?

Yes. The persona buttons are multi-select. Tap History and Foodie together, for example, and the AI blends both into a single cohesive route — you might get a historic district, a museum, a locally-famous café, and a craft brewery all in one plan. You can pick anywhere from one to all five vibes at once.

How accurate are the itineraries?

Tour Guide uses Google Gemini and is instructed to suggest only real, well-known places near your location. That said, AI can occasionally get hours, prices, or current status wrong — every itinerary includes a disclaimer and a per-stop “Open in Maps” link so you can verify each place before you go. Treat it as a strong local suggestion, not a guarantee.

The Bottom Line

If you’ve got an afternoon free in a town you don’t know well — or you want to play tourist in your own backyard for once — Tour Guide is worth the thirty seconds it takes to use it. Three steps, a sensible timed plan, Maps links for every stop, and a built-in honest reminder to check the hours before you walk out the door. That’s the whole thing. Go try it.