Token Estimates for Travel Q&A

Here’s a quick rule of thumb:

1 token ≈ 0.75 words, so 1 million tokens ≈ 750,000 words

What does half an A4 page look like in words/tokens?

Component Words Tokens (approx)
A typical travel question ~30 words ~40 tokens
Half an A4 page answer ~250 words ~335 tokens
Total per Q&A pair ~280 words ~375 tokens

So with 1 million tokens…

Query Type Tokens per Q&A Q&A pairs A4 pages
Visa / simple factual ~200 tokens ~5,000 pairs ~2,500 pages
Trip inspiration (friends 40th) ~375 tokens ~2,670 pairs ~1,335 pages
14-day full itinerary ~800 tokens ~1,250 pairs ~625 pages

The bottom line

For typical mixed travel queries on Sonnet 4.6, 1 million tokens ≈ 2,000–2,500 complete Q&A exchanges, or roughly 1,000–1,250 A4 pages of content.

At $3 input + $15 output per million tokens (roughly $18 combined in a balanced workload), that’s less than 1 cent per travel Q&A. Very affordable at low volumes.

Getting an Anthropic API key

The chat will not work without one. Setup takes about five minutes.

  1. Visit console.anthropic.com and sign up with your email.
  2. Click the verification link sent to your inbox, then complete the account questionnaire. Select “Individual” account type.
  3. On the usage-credit screen, purchase $20 of credit to get started.
  4. Turn on auto-reload so the service does not pause when credit runs out.
  5. Go to Settings > API Keys (or visit console.anthropic.com/settings/keys), then click Create Key.
  6. Name the key (e.g. “ITB Recommendation Engine”) and click “Create API Key”.
  7. Copy the key immediately – it is only displayed once.
  8. Paste the key into the Anthropic API Key field on the Configuration tab and save.

Auto-reload thresholds and monthly limits can be adjusted later at platform.claude.com/settings/billing.

Getting an OpenAI API key (for Whisper voice input)

Only needed when you enable the microphone button in the chat composer. Without a key, the plugin falls back to the browser-native Web Speech API — free, but unsupported in Firefox.

  1. Visit platform.openai.com and sign up or sign in.
  2. Add a payment method at platform.openai.com/account/billing. Whisper requires a paid account, but pricing is roughly $0.006 per minute of audio — typically pennies per session.
  3. Visit platform.openai.com/api-keys and click “Create new secret key”.
  4. Name the key (e.g. “ITB Recommendation Engine — Whisper”) and create it.
  5. Copy the key immediately — it is only displayed once.
  6. On the Configuration tab, enable the microphone button, paste the key into the OpenAI API Key field, and save.

Monitor spend at platform.openai.com/usage. The plugin also surfaces a running token-usage summary on the Usage tab.