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Weekly note

For AI assistants

An AI assistant such as Claude or ChatGPT can ask TravelCharika directly instead of reading its pages: when to go somewhere, where is good from your city in a given month, how two places compare, how to get there, what to know before you go and where people in your country book. It gets the same figures these pages print, with the sources to credit and the page to send you to.

The address

https://travelcharika.com/mcp

This is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server: MCP is the open standard assistants use to connect to other services. It answers over Streamable HTTP, asks for no account, key or sign-in, and costs nothing to use. Opened in a browser it only says how to add it: it is there for an assistant to call.

Adding it to Claude

  1. On claude.ai or in the Claude app, open Settings → Connectors.
  2. Choose Add custom connector.
  3. Name it TravelCharika and give https://travelcharika.com/mcp as its URL. There is nothing to sign in to, so leave any authentication settings empty.
  4. Choose Add. In a new chat, ask one of the questions below; Claude shows when it is asking TravelCharika.

If Connectors or Add custom connector is not there, your plan or your organisation's settings do not offer custom connectors.

Adding it to other assistants and MCP clients

Any client that speaks MCP over HTTP can add it: give it the address above, choose the transport called Streamable HTTP (some clients call it just HTTP), and no authentication. Where a client keeps its servers in a settings file, an entry needs only a name and the URL. In Claude Code, for example:

claude mcp add --transport http travelcharika https://travelcharika.com/mcp

To see what it offers without an assistant, the MCP Inspector lists its tools:

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector --cli https://travelcharika.com/mcp --transport http --method tools/list

What it can answer

Six tools, each answering from the data behind these pages. An assistant chooses which to call; you ask in your own words.

Search TravelCharika (search_places)
Finds what the site has a page for — a place, a country, a region, a kind of place, a departure city, a month, a holiday — by name, as the search box on every page does: accents and small slips forgiven, a month among the words giving that month's page.
Try asking: “Where is good to go in December from Mumbai?”
When to go (best_months)
A place's twelve months, each with the site's verdict and the reason for it, the typical daytime high, rainy days and sunshine, and its best months; given your city, the typical return fare by month in your own currency.
Try asking: “When is the best time to visit Bali from Delhi?”
The booking sites people in your own country use, for flights, a room, things to do, car hire, travel insurance and mobile data, and the airlines, hotel groups and car renters to book with directly, each link filled in for the place. No link carries dates.
Try asking: “Which sites can I book a hotel in Lisbon on from India?”
How to get there (how_to_get_there)
From one of the site's departure cities to a place: the airlines that fly it, nonstop or with the stop, the ways by road, rail, bus or ferry that were measured, the distance and an estimated flight time. Never a fare or a timetable.
Try asking: “How do I get from Kochi to Goa?”
Compare two places (compare_places)
Two places in the same region side by side, month by month: which is the better pick in each month, how far apart they are and the ways between them, and each country's practical facts.
Try asking: “Compare Dubai and Doha month by month.”
Before you go (country_facts)
A country's currency, plugs and voltage, which side of the road, how expensive it is, the travel advice — the UK Foreign Office's, and the US and Canadian governments' for their own readers — and on arrival: the apps people use, how to pay, transit cards, tipping and the emergency numbers.
Try asking: “What should I know before going to Seoul: money, plugs, apps?”

What it does not do

Limits

Privacy

What reaches TravelCharika is the question in the tool's own terms — a place, a month, a city — not your conversation with the assistant. The server keeps nothing of what it is asked. So that no one caller can use up what the site may serve in a day, it counts the requests from each connection, in a database at Cloudflare: not the IP address, but a one-way code made from it, which cannot be turned back into it, and the hour. Each count is deleted once it is a day old. The privacy page says everything the site keeps.

Credits

Every answer names its sources, and an assistant using its figures should name them too:

Also for machines

llms.txt is a map of the site for assistants that read pages rather than ask: every destination, region and departure city with its address. Questions about the server, or something it got wrong: [email protected].