Why the plan should leave the chat
ChatGPT is quick at a first draft. Ask for a week in Montenegro and you get a sensible run of towns in seconds.
A chat thread is a poor place to keep a trip, though. You scroll back to find the hotel, and a new conversation forgets the last one. In the Meridian Dispatch app the plan sits on a trip map that works offline, and the confirmations you forward land on the right day.
With the connector, ChatGPT works on that plan directly. Ask it to swap a hotel a month later and it edits the same trip, not a copy.
If your ChatGPT plan cannot add the connector
OpenAI decides which ChatGPT plans can add a custom connector, and how much it may do. Its help article says connectors are added on the web, not in the ChatGPT app, and that on some plans a connector can only read, which would let ChatGPT answer from the guides but not write the plan.
There is a route that works on every plan, Free included. Paste the prompt from the import guide into ChatGPT, and it writes a link with the whole trip inside. Tap it on your iPhone and the plan lands in the app, day by day, hotels included.
What ChatGPT knows once it is connected
It reads the travel preferences you set in the app: your pace, the stays you like, how you get around, and the countries you already know. Ask for somewhere new and it can tell those apart.
Its answers about places come from Meridian Dispatch guides to countries, towns, sights and events, each with a link to the page. If a guide is out of date, ChatGPT can send the desk a correction, and every applied fix is logged on the corrections page.
After the trip
The plan is only the start. As you travel, Meridian Dispatch puts your photos on the right days and writes each day up, every place named. The morning after you get home, the trip is a finished journal laid out like a magazine.
The app never asks for location access, and your photos are never uploaded.