trvl — Real travel search for your AI assistant

Ask your AI assistant to plan a real trip, and it actually can. trvl gives Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, Codex, or any MCP-compatible client one smart tool — the travel router — with live access to flights, hotels, rental cars, trains, buses, ferries, price alerts, award sweet spots, weather, and destination intel. Free for noncommercial use, no personal API keys for default search, no signup. One binary.

You: I have €300 and a free weekend. Surprise me.

Illustrative response shape (prices are examples): Dubrovnik, Croatia 🇭🇷 — ✈️ Ryanair HEL→DBV €167 RT · 🏨 Old Town Studios 4.6★ €84 · 🌡️ 26°C, sunny. 📊 Naive €350 → optimized €251 → saved €99 (28%) by flying Friday and splitting airlines.

▶ Try it live, no install: socialistic.ai/trvl-travel-mcp (community-hosted).

How it works, in one paragraph

trvl is a single binary that runs on your machine. Your AI client talks to it over MCP; it queries flight, hotel, transport, weather, and places sources, then merges, de-duplicates and optimizes the results before handing back one answer. Most sources are free public endpoints, so there is nothing to sign up for. The ones behind bot protection may reuse the browser session you already have, which is the one thing worth reading about before you install: see What trvl reads, and what it keeps.

Why trvl, not the alternatives

• Whole journey, door to door. It plans the entire trip across modes — home to airport, flight, arrival transfer, hotel, onward train — and prices each leg in its real mode. Most tools stop at one flight, one hotel.
• No personal API key for default search. There is no Amadeus key to apply for, subscription, or per-call bill on the default paths. Optional providers switch on when you supply their credentials; none is required for the default flight, hotel, or ground searches.
• Your assistant, your machine. One local binary, any MCP client, not locked to a vendor. Searching sends the query to the providers being searched, the same as any travel site would: route, dates and traveller count go to Google, Kiwi, Booking and the rest. What trvl keeps for itself stays on your machine, apart from a daily anonymous heartbeat you can switch off and any webhook you configure yourself — both spelled out below.
• It optimizes, not just lists. Shift-day pricing, split-airline routing, hidden-city checks, award sweet spots, round-trip fares. It hands back the cheaper option and shows what it saved.
• It is honest when a source fails. Typed statuses and labelled estimates, never an empty result dressed up as "nothing found."

Full head-to-head against Google Flights, KAYAK, Skyscanner, Kiwi, and other travel MCPs: docs/COMPARISON.md.

What it can do

Is this for you?

Yes if you already plan trips with an AI assistant and want it to search real flights, hotels, trains, buses, ferries, and transfers instead of guessing — or if you're building an app that needs travel intent without a paid travel API.

Probably not if you just want to book on a website (use Google Flights), or you want a hosted product with an account and dashboard. trvl is a tool you run, not a service you log into.

Full positioning: docs/POSITIONING.md.

Install

Let your AI do it — paste into Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, or Codex:

Read https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MikkoParkkola/trvl/main/AGENTS.md and set up trvl

It installs the binary, wires the MCP server, installs the skill, and verifies everything. Under a minute.

Or by hand:

brew install MikkoParkkola/tap/trvl   # install
trvl mcp install                       # auto-detects your AI client

Restart your client. trvl mcp install --client <name> targets a specific one (10 supported: Claude Desktop/Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Codex, VS Code, Zed, Gemini, Amazon Q, LM Studio).

# Direct binary (no Homebrew)
TRVL_VERSION="$(curl -fsSLI -o /dev/null -w '%{url_effective}' https://github.com/MikkoParkkola/trvl/releases/latest | sed 's#.*/v##')"
curl -fsSL "https://github.com/MikkoParkkola/trvl/releases/download/v${TRVL_VERSION}/trvl_${TRVL_VERSION}_$(uname -s | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')_$(uname -m | sed 's/x86_64/amd64/;s/aarch64/arm64/').tar.gz" | tar xz -C /usr/local/bin trvl

# Go
go install github.com/MikkoParkkola/trvl/cmd/trvl@latest

# Docker
docker run --rm ghcr.io/mikkoparkkola/trvl flights HEL NRT 2027-06-15

# Build from source
git clone https://github.com/MikkoParkkola/trvl.git && cd trvl && make build

# Claude Code CLI
claude mcp add trvl --transport stdio -- trvl mcp

# Manual JSON (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.)
# { "mcpServers": { "trvl": { "command": "trvl", "args": ["mcp"] } } }

Try it

Paste any of these to your assistant once trvl is wired:

Find the cheapest realistic trip from Helsinki for the long weekend of July 1–5, nonstop, hotel near the center.
Compare award sweet spots HEL→LHR business on Aug 15 with 80k Amex MR + 20k Virgin points.
Create a mistake-fare watch for HEL→BCN, July 1–8, and alert me below €90.

More starter prompts and what good answers look like: docs/DEMO.md.

Why trust it

An AI agent acts on trvl's output without a human checking every result, so the bar is correctness, not just coverage.

• It tells you when it can't. A blocked or rate-limited provider returns a typed status (AKAMAI_BLOCK, RATE_LIMITED, BOOKING_COOKIES_MISSING) with a fix hint, instead of a fake "nothing found." Estimated values are labelled; currency-mismatched totals are skipped, not faked.
• Tested more than it is written. More test code than source, race-checked on macOS, Linux, and Windows. A smoke gate runs the packaged binary before any release — a build that doesn't run can't ship.
• It degrades gracefully. Providers run concurrently with per-provider timeouts; one source failing returns partial results instead of aborting the search.
• It's observable. trvl status (or the local /dashboard in HTTP mode) shows per-provider success rate, latency, freshness, and circuit-breaker state.

On hotel prices specifically. Hotel metasearch exposes list-level rates first; some are real, some only firm up after the property detail page reveals the room/tax/cancellation matrix. So trvl separates discovery (search_hotels — fast, lead-in prices) from decisions (search_accommodations — verifies room-level offers before ranking) and drill-down (search_hotels_with_details, hotel_rooms). It provides booking links for manual handoff but never books, holds, or guarantees a rate. Detail: docs/PROVIDERS.md.

What trvl reads, and what it keeps