flight availability checker

The problem

Finding real-time flight availability through manual searches is slow and prone to stale data. Developers need a way to programmatically check routes and prices without building complex scrapers or managing multiple airline APIs.

What it does

• Queries OpenFlights data for real-time flight availability between airport codes.
• Returns structured data including airlines, pricing, and booking URLs.
• Manages session state to handle pagination and cached results across conversations.
• Provides consistent error handling for upstream service outages or rate limits.

Frameworks & tools

MCP (Model Context Protocol), OpenFlights API.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

Standard LLMs cannot access real-time flight databases and often hallucinate routes or prices. This skill provides a structured interface to a live MCP tool, ensuring the agent retrieves actual flight data rather than guessing based on training weights.

Use cases

• Building travel assistants that verify flight options for specific dates.
• Checking availability for multi-city itineraries using IATA codes.
• Automating price and airline comparisons for business travel planning.

Known limitations

Requires the flight_availability_checker MCP server to be active. Relies on the availability of public OpenFlights data.