Trek travel planner

Trek travel planner is a self-hosted, open-source travel planning application for building and managing trips with collaborators. It combines itinerary planning, maps, reservations, budgets, packing lists, files, chat, and AI-assisted access to trip information in one system. It is released under AGPL-3.0 and is designed to run on hardware or infrastructure controlled by the user.

What it does

TREK lets users create trips, arrange places and activities across itinerary days, and update plans collaboratively in real time. The planner can display places on a map, move activities between days, optimize routes by distance, and send a day to Google Maps for turn-by-turn navigation. Users can search with OpenStreetMap by default, with Google Places available as an option, and can view weather forecasts from Open-Meteo for up to 16 days.

The application also keeps supporting trip details alongside the itinerary. Reservations can include confirmation numbers, files, status, and scheduled dates. Budgets support multiple currencies as well as per-person and per-day calculations. Packing lists can use trip templates, assign items to people, and track completion. Public read-only share links can provide an itinerary to people without requiring a login.

TREK includes an MCP server with OAuth 2.1. When connected to an assistant such as Claude, Cursor, or another compatible agent, the assistant can read and, where authorized, modify trip information through the available scopes. This is intended to let an AI work from the itinerary rather than requiring users to repeatedly copy their plans into a separate conversation.

Who it helps

TREK is aimed at individuals, families, and groups organizing trips together, particularly people who want their travel data on infrastructure they control. It can also fit self-hosting enthusiasts and organizations that prefer an open-source, internally managed planner instead of a hosted SaaS service. Its collaboration features are useful when several travelers need to edit the same itinerary, discuss decisions, answer polls, or coordinate attendance.

Notable capabilities

• Real-time collaborative itineraries with live presence, notes, polls, and trip-level chat.
• Maps, place search, route optimization, cross-day activity moves, and weather information.
• Reservations, multi-currency budgets, packing lists, document and file storage, and PDF or ICS export.
• Optional Atlas, Vacay, and Journey addons for travel history, vacation-day tracking, and photo-based journaling.
• MCP and OAuth 2.1 support for connecting compatible AI assistants to trip data.

How it fits a workflow

A user can deploy TREK with Docker, Docker Compose, Helm/Kubernetes, Unraid, Proxmox, or compatible ARM64 hardware such as a Raspberry Pi. The documented Docker setup stores application data in a SQLite file on a mounted volume, and the product is also presented as a PWA. After creating a trip, collaborators can add places, reservations, expenses, packing items, and files directly alongside the schedule. An AI connector can then use authorized itinerary data for planning questions or updates.

Strengths and limits

The main strength is the combination of collaborative planning and self-hosting: the itinerary, group discussion, and related travel records remain in the user's deployment. TREK also covers several practical planning tasks without requiring separate spreadsheet, checklist, or itinerary tools. However, self-hosting requires access to a suitable server or container environment and responsibility for deployment, storage, authentication, backups, and reverse-proxy configuration. AI features require a compatible MCP client and authorization setup, while external map and place-search choices may depend on the selected provider.