holiplan

An MCP server for planning a family's year around school holidays and a limited leave allowance.

Assistants are good at suggesting destinations and bad at remembering that Whit Monday is a public holiday, that five carried-over days expire in June, and that you already said no drive over three and a half hours. This server does the parts that should be calculated; the assistant does the parts that need judgement.

Holiday data comes from OpenHolidays (CC BY 4.0), which covers public and school holidays for a growing list of countries, with no API key.

Status

Pre-release (0.6). Stateless: your ledger is a JSON file you keep, and the server stores nothing. See PRIVACY.md for exactly what goes where, and docs/examples.md for what a conversation looks like.

Related MCP server: Apple Calendar MCP Server

Use it in Claude Desktop

Install uv, then add holiplan to claude_desktop_config.json and restart Claude:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "holiplan": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["holiplan"]
    }
  }
}

uvx fetches holiplan from PyPI and runs it; there is nothing else to install. Without uv, pip install holiplan and use "command": "holiplan" with no args.

Start with the Set up my family profile prompt, which builds a ledger with you one question at a time, or copy examples/ledger.example.json to my-ledger.json and edit it. Tell Claude where the file is, and save the updated ledger whenever Claude hands it back. A conversation then looks like:

Here's my ledger. What do the 2027 school holidays look like, and what can I afford?

Add two weeks on the Danish coast from 17 July.

What needs booking next?

docs/examples.md has these conversations in full, with real figures.

Tools

Resources: JSON schemas for the ledger, profile and trip (holiplan://schema/...), and a blank starter ledger (holiplan://ledger/starter).

Prompts: Set up my family profile, Plan my year, Plan this holiday window, What needs doing next?, Make a brief for my partner.

Design notes

• The ledger is the source of truth. Tools take it in and hand it back, so the plan doesn't drift between conversations.

• Intent decides leave. A week with intent home or camp occupies a school holiday window without costing leave. Override with takes_leave.

• Carryover is spent first, but only by trips ending before the expiry date, so "these days expire in June" shows up as a warning while you can still act on it.

• A trip over New Year costs each year only its own days.

• Local holidays follow your home town. Some holidays cover only part of a region, like Augsburg's Peace Festival in Bavaria. With the profile's home set to a town, only that town's local holidays count as days off; without a home they all do. Set local_holidays to "include" or "exclude" to override. ignore_holidays ("MM-DD") covers what the data can't tell apart, such as Assumption Day ("08-15"), which is only a holiday in Catholic-majority Bavarian towns.

• School windows include the free days around them. The official Monday-to-Friday dates are stretched over adjacent weekends and public holidays before trips are checked against them. School holidays of two school days or fewer, like All Souls' Day in Austria, are listed separately as closures.

• One school type's holidays. Where a region's dates differ by school type (general and vocational schools in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, primary and secondary in Zürich), the profile's school_group picks one; without it, the general schools'. get_holiday_windows lists the region's groups.

• A drafted year to start from. holiplan.service.draft_year places one trip in each school holiday, summer first with two weeks, where each costs the least leave, and never over budget. Every drafted trip is an idea to keep, move or delete.

• Half-day holidays cost half a day. Zürich's Sechseläuten afternoon is a half day off, not a full one.

• Regions accept ISO codes. OpenHolidays uses its own codes where they differ (Vienna is AT-WI, not AT-9); either works, and an unknown region is an error rather than a quietly incomplete year.

• Ledgers are versioned. Older ledgers are migrated when read, a newer one is refused, and a malformed one gets an error naming the trip and field at fault.

• When OpenHolidays is down, the server serves the last copy it fetched, or says plainly that it can't check dates right now. It never guesses.

• No real names. Children are identified by alias and interests only.

• The server never books anything. It knows what needs booking and by when; you book it and record the result.

Roadmap

• Drive-time filtering (OpenRouteService or self-hosted OSRM)

• Remote deployment over Streamable HTTP

• Publish to the MCP registry

• School holidays that differ by municipality (Appenzell Innerrhoden, Graubünden), chosen by the profile's home

Development

git clone https://github.com/adekola/holiplan.git
cd holiplan
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate   # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"
python -m unittest discover -s tests                # offline

To run your working copy in Claude Desktop, point command at the venv's Python (.venv/bin/python, or .venv\Scripts\python.exe on Windows) with "args": ["-m", "holiplan.server"].

Licence

MIT, see LICENSE. Holiday data: OpenHolidays, CC BY 4.0.