Almanac

Every family has a travel bucket list, and it lives in a notes app that gets read aloud every January.

Japan for the blossoms. The safari. All fifty states before the oldest graduates. Then spring break gets booked in February because someone remembered, summer goes to the same rental it always goes to, and Japan stays on the list. Peak blossom is a two-week window and nobody was watching for it.

Two kids, 13 and 9, give a ten-year plan five real summers

Most kids remember little before seven, and somewhere around fifteen they stop wanting to come. Graduation is the horizon you plan to; it isn't the horizon you have. Enter Ella at 13 and Mia at 9 with a plan running to 2035, and Almanac colors every year by who is still home. Ella is 16 in 2029. After 2030 the trip with everyone in it is over.

The same arithmetic runs for an empty-nester who wants one trip a year with grown kids, or college friends who have spent a decade saying "we should do a big one." A fixed group, a closing window, and a list nobody has put dates on.

Every trip lands in a year, with the reason written under it

Almanac is software a travel advisor uses to turn that list into a dated plan and hold it until the list is done. The itinerary tools advisors already pay for, Travefy, Axus, Vamoos and Wetu among them, each model one trip. Almanac's solver holds five things at once: seasons (the Serengeti migration runs July to October), school breaks, ages (Mia turns 10 in 2027, the floor for New Zealand), money (a $44,000 safari needs a year nothing else has claimed), and geography (one well-routed road trip takes six states off the list).

Everyone the trip is for gets asked

The list comes in two stages, and the second is the part nobody else does.

The plan is solved against the brief and every answer together. It also hands the advisor the details worth saying out loud: someone in the family is a Hello Kitty obsessive, the fiftieth anniversary falls in Japan in five years, so the Japan trip gets built around it. The assessment is the one piece the prototype leaves out on purpose. It has to be designed by watching an advisor run the conversation, not guessed at from a desk.

When life moves, the plan reshuffles

A trip-by-trip advisor has two options when something goes wrong: cancel, or postpone. Both cost the family a year. An advisor holding ten dated trips has a third. Pull Portugal forward, push Spain back two years, and the summer still happens, because there is always another trip whose season fits. In the prototype, holding Tanzania for three years changes four lines.

The plan then tells her who to call this month and what to say: "it's the Iceland year and it has to be February," or "transatlantic fares just dropped and you're going to Spain in the fall." That is why the second year of the retainer is worth as much as the first.

The toy runs one scenario: kids who should see the world before they graduate

Pick from a list, set a budget, and drag it down to watch which trips fall past the years everyone is home. Then break the plan with one of four disruptions and read the diff.

Real

Forty destinations with their season windows

Estimated

Costs, minimum ages, days per trip

Missing

The conversation, the assessment, the advisor

The wealthiest families already plan a decade out

Concierges serving families worth $30 million and up build three-, five- and ten-year travel plans against seasonality, safety and the kids' schooling. Everyone else has a travel advisor who books one trip at a time. Almanac gives that advisor the decade plan to offer. She resells it rather than using it to save herself time, and the family owns the plan: if they change advisors, it goes with them.

Nothing has been sold yet

Almanac is at the idea stage. No advisor has used it, the prototype runs on hand-typed data, and the best finding behind it, that concierges already plan a decade out, traces to a single outlet and needs a second source. The cheapest test is one advisor, one family, one plan, and an actual ask for money.