Travel Packing Assistant

A Claude Code plugin for making optimal use of a baggage allowance on an international itinerary — and for knowing, before the airport, exactly what that allowance is.

The problem it solves is not "what should I bring". It is the narrower and more expensive one: you have several flights on different carriers, each publishing a different allowance for a fare brand you probably cannot name, and the number that actually governs your bags is the tightest one on the route. Nobody works that out at 05:00 on the day. This works it out in advance, then packs to it.

/travel-packing:itinerary       enter the flights
/travel-packing:policies        research every carrier's real allowance
/travel-packing:inventory       what you're carrying, by weight
/travel-packing:weigh           scale readings, reconciled against the inventory
/travel-packing:plan            solve the pack, bag by bag and cube by cube
/travel-packing:docs            counter card + packing list, as PDFs

And when it does not fit:

/travel-packing:overage         price every way out, recommend one
/travel-packing:leave-behind    ranked drop list, with a stop line

What makes the answers trustworthy

Every allowance figure carries its source. A URL, the sentence it was read in, the date it was fetched, and a confidence level. Anything not read on the carrier's own page for your actual ticket stays flagged as inferred or assumed all the way through to the printed document. Baggage allowances are the most-copied, least-maintained numbers on the web — an out-of-date table from an aggregator looks exactly like current policy right up until the desk.

It packs to the binding limit, not the average one. The tightest per-segment limit across the ticket, with the segment that set it named. Costs a little capacity; removes the failure where your bag is legal for the leg you researched and illegal for the leg you didn't.

Measured weight beats itemised weight. Nobody weighs every sock. So the reconciler compares the scale reading against the sum of what you listed and reports the gap in kilograms rather than quietly pretending the inventory is complete.

The solver is deterministic. Same inputs, same plan, every run. A packing list that reshuffles between readings cannot be followed — you have already put things in cubes.

The two documents

The counter card — one A4 page, printed, in your hand at check-in. Binding limits in large type, each bag's weight against its allowance, the per-segment allowance table, and the excess-baggage prices so you know the cost of the decision you are being asked to make. Every number shows its confidence and the date it was verified, so you can check a claim at the desk against the carrier's own published figure.

The packing list — the working document. Bag by bag, cube by cube, with tick boxes, markers on the cabin-only and checked-only items, and the not-packed list at the end.

Both render from the workspace YAML directly, so no number is transcribed by hand — as PDFs via Typst, and as Markdown for publishing to a static site. Both media apply the same measured-beats-projected rule, so a bag cannot read OVER in one and TIGHT in the other. They can be saved locally, emailed, pushed to cloud storage, or committed into a site repo — see docs/delivery.md.

How it is organised

One trip workspace per itinerary, created by /travel-packing:new-trip. The plugin is stateless; the workspace holds the flights, the researched allowances, the bags, the inventory and the generated plan, as YAML files with published schemas. Workspaces are private by default — a packing workspace names the dates your home is empty.

<trip-workspace>/
├── itinerary.yaml    segments, tickets, carriers
├── allowances.yaml   researched policy per segment + the binding limit
├── bags.yaml         bags, cubes, tare weights, every scale reading
├── inventory.yaml    everything being carried
├── plan.yaml         generated allocation
├── research/         saved carrier policy pages — the evidence
└── output/           rendered PDFs

Contents

Skills	new-workspace, itinerary-intake, baggage-policy-research, packing-inventory, weigh-bags, pack-plan, overage-options, leave-behind, packing-docs
Scripts	pack_solver.py (allocation), reconcile.py (scale vs inventory), validate.py (schema + cross-file checks), render_markdown.py (documents as Markdown)
Templates	typst/counter-card.typ, typst/packing-list.typ
Reference	data/carriage-rules.md, data/typical-weights.md, data/packing-categories.md
Docs	docs/data-model.md, docs/design-notes.md, docs/delivery.md

The scripts have no solver dependency and run standalone against a workspace directory; they need PyYAML and jsonschema only.

Installation

/plugin marketplace add danielrosehill/Claude-Code-Plugins
/plugin install travel-packing@danielrosehill

Typst is required only for the PDF output: install instructions.

What it deliberately does not do

No volumetric packing model — volume matters, but weight is what gets charged, and per-item dimensions are not data anyone will enter. No bundled airline allowance database — a cached table would go stale silently and then be worse than nothing, because it would look like a source. No booking: it prices the options and makes a recommendation; buying the bag is yours.

Reasoning for these and the other design decisions is in docs/design-notes.md.

Caution

The allowance figures in any workspace were researched on a date, from carriers who change them without notice, and the plugin's reference files describe general patterns rather than any specific airline's current policy. Check verified_on and the per-entry confidence before relying on any of it. Nothing here is a substitute for the allowance shown on your own booking.

MIT licensed.