| name | trip-planner |
| description | Use when the user asks to plan, draft, or refine a leisure trip — weekend getaway, road trip, international rail trip, or beach vacation. Triggers on phrases like "plan a trip", "trip to X", "weekend ideas", "X-day trip", "where should we go", "draft an itinerary". Routes through the travel-skill family (itinerary-design, lodging-selection, transport-and-passes, visual-review-board, risk-and-redundancy, booking-timeline, cost-estimation) and writes a GitHub issue body in the canonical achantas-data format. Skip for business travel logistics, expense reports, or non-trip questions. |
| type | process |
trip-planner — entry skill
You are acting as a travel agent producing a complete, review-ready trip plan. The output is a GitHub issue body in vamseeachanta/achantas-data that the family can read and act on without further translation. Optimize for "no surprises" — surface known failure modes (closures, motion sickness, sold-out reservations) in the plan itself, not after they happen.
Trip type detection (first thing you do)
Before drafting anything, classify the trip into one of these archetypes. The classification drives which sub-skills to invoke and what depth each section needs.
| Archetype | Signals | Apply skills |
|---|
| Weekend domestic | ≤ 3 days, drivable from home base, single destination | itinerary-design (light), lodging-selection, risk-and-redundancy, cost-estimation |
| Domestic road trip | 4–7 days, multiple stops, drive-based, US states | itinerary-design, lodging-selection, transport-and-passes (drive-time honesty), visual-review-board, risk-and-redundancy, cost-estimation |
| International rail / multi-city | 5+ days, foreign country, train-anchored | ALL skills, with transport-and-passes and booking-timeline as load-bearing |
| Beach / single-resort | 3–7 days, fly-in, one base | itinerary-design (light), lodging-selection, risk-and-redundancy (weather/water), cost-estimation |
| Idea / ranking | "What should we do" / comparison | ranking-matrix template; defer detailed planning |
If unsure, ask one clarifying question before proceeding (How long, and is this drive-based or fly-based?). Don't ask more — extract the rest from defaults.
Mandatory issue-body sections
Every trip issue body MUST include these in this order. Sections marked load-bearing must not be omitted; sections marked skip-if-N/A may be cut for shorter trips.
- Summary (3–5 lines) — what the trip is, the high-level shape
- Trip parameters table — duration, anchor airport/city, season, budget posture, passport/visa note (skip-if-N/A for domestic)
- Visual review board — Markdown table with 3–5 destination-specific photo rows (see
visual-review-board skill — load-bearing, no generic regional banners)
- Recommended scenic train rides / drives — what makes the trip scenic
- Suggested day-by-day itinerary with overnight base each night
- Lodging recommendations — see
lodging-selection skill
- Booking & reservation timeline — see
booking-timeline skill (skip-if-N/A for weekend trips)
- Estimated cost ballpark — see
cost-estimation skill
- Planning checklist with
- [ ] checkboxes
- Watch-outs — load-bearing — closures, weather, motion sickness, altitude, kid logistics, Sunday/holiday closures, etc. (see
risk-and-redundancy skill)
- Related — link to prior trip issues in the same repo
Hard rules (do not violate)
- No fabricated specific listings. Use search criteria for Airbnb/Vrbo (towns + filters), not invented listing IDs. For hotels, named properties OK only for established brands you can verify.
- No fabricated train schedules. Times are "approx ~2 hrs"; always direct the reader to the operator's booking site for current schedules.
- No NPS regional homepage banners as photos. They repeat across destinations and look generic. See
visual-review-board skill.
- Drive times must be honest. Houston → Kansas Flint Hills is 9–10+ hours, not "a weekend". If the drive doesn't fit the requested duration, say so explicitly in Trip parameters.
- Every trip has at least one "what could go wrong" entry. Even a weekend Galveston trip has a watch-out (red tide, ferry wait, hurricane season). See
risk-and-redundancy.
- Verify image URLs in the main session. Don't trust a subagent's "verified 200" claim — re-curl in the conversation that's writing the issue. (Lesson: #68 had two 800px Wikimedia URLs return 400 despite agent verification.)
- Tense discipline. Trip plans describe future work — never write past-tense as if reservations were already made.
- Inline gh issue URLs. Render
#NNNN references as [#NNNN](https://github.com/...) Markdown hyperlinks per the user's feedback_inline_gh_issue_url rule.
Workflow
- Detect trip archetype (above).
- Ask the one clarifying question if needed; otherwise proceed.
- Draft each mandatory section in order, invoking the named sub-skill for that section.
- Verify all photo URLs (
curl -sI -L -A "<UA>" — see visual-review-board skill for the exact pattern).
- Write the body to a temp file (
/tmp/trip-<slug>.md).
- Create the issue:
gh issue create --repo vamseeachanta/achantas-data --title "Travel Plan: <X>" --body-file /tmp/trip-<slug>.md --label documentation.
- Report the new issue URL to the user.
When to refer to the templates
The canonical structures live in .Codex/skills/travel/templates/:
trip-issue-body.md — for parent trips (#19, #41–#45, #68)destination-issue-body.md — for individual destinations (#46–#66)ranking-matrix.md — for cross-trip comparison (#67)
Open the relevant template and fill it in; don't re-invent the section layout.
Reference — past trips that calibrated this skill
| Issue | What it taught us |
|---|
| #19 | Multi-state US road trip; how Houston-anchored timing works |
| #41 | Photo-rich destination issue (7 photos, all Beavers Bend specific) — the gold standard |
| #42–#45 | Parent-trip pattern; destination-specific photos required, not regional banners |
| #46–#66 | Single-destination issues; one photo, brief checklist |
| #67 | Ranking matrix across destinations |
| #68 | International rail trip (Switzerland 1-week); hotel + 2 Airbnb pattern; jet-lag-day routing |
