Skill library / Perplexity

Holiday Research Planner skill for Perplexity

Holiday research usually means a dozen open tabs, conflicting blog posts and prices that are out of date by the time you find them. This skill gets Perplexity to gather current information with sources you can click, compare destinations on the things that matter to your household, and turn the result into a plan you can act on.

What it's good for

• Choosing between Portugal, Spain and Greece for a week in late May with two children under ten, a budget of £3,000 and flights from Manchester.
• Planning a long weekend in Edinburgh for a couple's anniversary, including trains, walkable areas to stay in and a couple of restaurants that need booking ahead.
• Checking whether a multigenerational trip to the Lake District is workable with a grandparent who struggles with steps, and finding step-free places to stay and visit.

How the skill works

1. Ask me for the essentials before researching anything: who is travelling and their ages, rough dates or month, departure airport or station, total budget, must-haves, and anything to avoid such as long transfers, high heat or late-night flights.
2. Search for current information on the destination or shortlist, covering weather in your travel month, typical flight or train times from your starting point, entry requirements for a UK passport, and any known disruption, strikes or seasonal closures.
3. Build a cost estimate split into transport, accommodation, food, activities and local travel. Show it as a simple table with a low and high figure for each line, and say which figures come from a quoted source and which are estimates.
4. Draft a day-by-day outline that groups activities by area to avoid wasted travel, leaves free time, and flags anything that needs booking ahead. If I gave you several destinations, compare them side by side first and recommend one with reasons.
5. Finish with a short checklist of things to verify directly before paying, such as the airline or hotel's own site, Foreign Office travel advice, and passport validity, and list every source you used with its link.

Built-in rules

• Never present a price, opening time or entry rule as certain. Give the source and date where you can, and tell me to confirm on the official site before booking.
• Do not recommend anything that conflicts with the constraints I gave, such as budget, mobility needs or children's ages. If something is a stretch, say so plainly.
• Prefer official, recent and local sources over affiliate-style listicles, and say when sources disagree or when information is thin.

Example

You: “We're a family of four, kids are 6 and 9, looking at a week somewhere warm in the first half of October from Bristol. Budget about £3,500 all in. Can you compare a couple of options?”
Result: A side-by-side comparison of three destinations with October weather, flight times from Bristol, estimated total costs against your £3,500, kid-friendly highlights and linked sources, ending in a recommended pick and a draft seven-day plan.

SKILL.md template

Save as holiday-research-planner/SKILL.md.

---
name: holiday-research-planner
description: "Researches a holiday destination and builds a realistic trip plan with costs, timings, and sources. Use it when you're comparing places to go, planning a family break, or want to check what a trip will really cost before booking anything."
---

# Holiday Research Planner

## Workflow
1. Ask me for the essentials before researching anything: who is travelling and their ages, rough dates or month, departure airport or station, total budget, must-haves, and anything to avoid such as long transfers, high heat or late-night flights.
2. Search for current information on the destination or shortlist, covering weather in your travel month, typical flight or train times from your starting point, entry requirements for a UK passport, and any known disruption, strikes or seasonal closures.
3. Build a cost estimate split into transport, accommodation, food, activities and local travel. Show it as a simple table with a low and high figure for each line, and say which figures come from a quoted source and which are estimates.
4. Draft a day-by-day outline that groups activities by area to avoid wasted travel, leaves free time, and flags anything that needs booking ahead. If I gave you several destinations, compare them side by side first and recommend one with reasons.
5. Finish with a short checklist of things to verify directly before paying, such as the airline or hotel's own site, Foreign Office travel advice, and passport validity, and list every source you used with its link.

## Rules
- Never present a price, opening time or entry rule as certain. Give the source and date where you can, and tell me to confirm on the official site before booking.
- Do not recommend anything that conflicts with the constraints I gave, such as budget, mobility needs or children's ages. If something is a stretch, say so plainly.
- Prefer official, recent and local sources over affiliate-style listicles, and say when sources disagree or when information is thin.

How to install in Perplexity

Copy the template above, then open Perplexity. In the sidebar, open Projects, choose New project and call it "Holiday Research Planner". Paste into the project's Instructions, then ask your questions from inside the project.

Pro tip

Create a Perplexity project for the trip and add your constraints, such as budget, travellers and dates, to its instructions, then keep all follow-up questions inside it so every answer stays tied to the same plan. Use the Focus or source options to lean on recent, reliable pages, and always open the cited links for prices.

FAQ

Related skills

• Research Summary skill for Perplexity
• Product Comparison Shopper skill for Perplexity