flights

This MCP server provides travel planning capabilities, focusing on flight searches and hotel recommendations. It exposes tools such as search-flights for querying available flights, today to retrieve the current date for temporal context, and search-hotels to find accommodations. You can use these tools to compose complex travel plans, e.g., asking for the latest flight to reach a destination by a certain time, or finding hotels near a landmark within a budget. The server aggregates data from Booking.com's API for flights and hotels, enabling a unified interface for planning trips. To work with Claude Desktop, you can point Claude at this MCP server configuration; programmatic usage is demonstrated by initializing clients for flights and maps, listing available tools, and invoking them via a tool-dispatch mechanism.

Prerequisites:

• Node.js installed on your system
• Booking.com API key from RapidAPI
• Optional: Google Maps API key if you plan to enable map-based features in extended configurations

Installation steps:

1. Install or access the MCP server package (example uses an npm package named flights-mcp-server):

npm install -g flights-mcp-server

2. Start the MCP server (example using npx as the launcher):

# If using a local binary or script
npx flights-mcp-server

3. If you are configuring for Claude Desktop or a client, ensure your environment variables are set, e.g.:

export BOOKING_COM_API_KEY=<YOUR_BOOKING_DOT_COM_API_KEY>
# Optional for map-related features
export GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY=<YOUR_GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY>

4. Verify the server is reachable and ready to accept tool calls.

Note: The README indicates the Booking.com API key is required for flight and hotel lookups, and a Google Maps API key is needed for location-based features in extended configurations.

Tips and common issues:

• Ensure BOOKING_COM_API_KEY is valid and has the necessary permissions for the Booking.com API endpoints used by the server.
• If you encounter authentication errors, double-check environment variable propagation in your launcher (npx, docker, etc.).
• For Claude Desktop integration, you may need to align the server name with your client configuration (e.g., using a server block named 'flights').
• The current feature set includes search-flights, today, and search-hotels; additional features like car rentals, hotel reviews, and taxis are listed as coming soon.
• If you run into CORS or network restrictions, ensure outbound access to Booking.com APIs and Google Maps is allowed in your environment.
• When running multiple MCP servers (e.g., flights and maps), you can wire tool discovery to aggregate tools from both servers for unified tool usage.