Author here. I'm trying to visit every country and I've been to 158 so far.
Before I decide where to travel, I'd ask a local friend which season to avoid, or open up dozens of browser tabs on climate data to figure out what the place is like in a given month.
Climate data still miss things. Cancun in September looks great on paper, with 31°C and 10 hours of sun, but it's hurricane season and the beaches can be covered in seaweed.
Typical info that locals would know, which can also be captured as static data.
So I built SeasonMap to answer "when should I go to <place>?"
What you can do:
- Pick a travel style (city walk, beach, hiking, skiing, max sun, low humidity, etc.) and see every place ranked on a map
- See what's in season and what to avoid, and why: monsoon, hurricanes, extreme heat, bad air, peak crowds
- Filter destinations by temperature, rainfall, sunshine, air quality and hazard seasons
- Open a place to see its whole year: month by month weather, events (festivals, whale watching, cherry blossom), crowd levels, practical notes like scams, and traveller anecdotes summarized by AI with links to the sources
Data Source & how I made it:
- The climate data is ERA5 normals via Open-Meteo (2016–2025), corrected with NOAA station data where available.
- Events, hazards and traveller notes were researched and by AI agents, and every one links to its source. Gathering it was easy. Checking it was the hard part.
- Yes, I've used AI heavily on this project before anyone call it an AI slop. Making was easy, but it took billons of tokens of beating whack-a-mole ai to polish and tweak to make it usable and decent. Through that, I've created many skills and evals ranging from visual qa, evals for irregular data, automated i18n and others. It still feels much like AI as I was using Claude Design, which i want to improve on. I tried using local llm, but the throughput was so low.
Pricing: the first 5 minutes are fully open, no signup. After that, the top 3 destinations and 25 place breakdowns a month are free. A 30-day pass is $7, $39 a year or $69 lifetime.
I spent many many many hours researching these numbers again and again the last winter seasons. Generally I think it's really useful and I saved it for the the next months.
However I would heavily suggest working on the design so it doesn't shout being AI generated so instantly. If you haven't said you spent hours debugging it I would have instantly closed it because I wouldn't have guessed it works actually this well.
wow it's interesting to see other folks did researches like this when they plan for a trip. Any other data you researched that is missing here? Thanks for the feedback, the design is the part I want to improve the most. I'm not a fan of these Claude design.
haha european summers are the best though. long sun hours festivals everywhere. from my travels, i learned the cold countries (well i guess not spain) have the best summer.
haha yeah especially this summer! thanks for the feedback. yeah, the region/country aggregation can be a bit off. i'm still tuning the best parameter for each preset.
Oh I added that recently! We use Price Level Index from World Bank's International Comparison Program 2021. (US dollars needed to buy the same GDP basket, normalised so World = 100). It's CC BY-4.0 open data. I found it to be a bit inaccurate though. Maybe I'll add big mac index. Numbeo was ruled out on licence and per-call cost.
Before I decide where to travel, I'd ask a local friend which season to avoid, or open up dozens of browser tabs on climate data to figure out what the place is like in a given month.
Climate data still miss things. Cancun in September looks great on paper, with 31°C and 10 hours of sun, but it's hurricane season and the beaches can be covered in seaweed.
Typical info that locals would know, which can also be captured as static data.
So I built SeasonMap to answer "when should I go to <place>?"
What you can do:
- Pick a travel style (city walk, beach, hiking, skiing, max sun, low humidity, etc.) and see every place ranked on a map
- See what's in season and what to avoid, and why: monsoon, hurricanes, extreme heat, bad air, peak crowds
- Filter destinations by temperature, rainfall, sunshine, air quality and hazard seasons
- Open a place to see its whole year: month by month weather, events (festivals, whale watching, cherry blossom), crowd levels, practical notes like scams, and traveller anecdotes summarized by AI with links to the sources
Data Source & how I made it: - The climate data is ERA5 normals via Open-Meteo (2016–2025), corrected with NOAA station data where available.
- Events, hazards and traveller notes were researched and by AI agents, and every one links to its source. Gathering it was easy. Checking it was the hard part.
- Yes, I've used AI heavily on this project before anyone call it an AI slop. Making was easy, but it took billons of tokens of beating whack-a-mole ai to polish and tweak to make it usable and decent. Through that, I've created many skills and evals ranging from visual qa, evals for irregular data, automated i18n and others. It still feels much like AI as I was using Claude Design, which i want to improve on. I tried using local llm, but the throughput was so low.
Pricing: the first 5 minutes are fully open, no signup. After that, the top 3 destinations and 25 place breakdowns a month are free. A 30-day pass is $7, $39 a year or $69 lifetime.
iOS and Android apps are coming soon.
Any feedback welcome.
I spent many many many hours researching these numbers again and again the last winter seasons. Generally I think it's really useful and I saved it for the the next months.
However I would heavily suggest working on the design so it doesn't shout being AI generated so instantly. If you haven't said you spent hours debugging it I would have instantly closed it because I wouldn't have guessed it works actually this well.
wow it's interesting to see other folks did researches like this when they plan for a trip. Any other data you researched that is missing here? Thanks for the feedback, the design is the part I want to improve the most. I'm not a fan of these Claude design.
Good idea, but it says that hiking in Spain in august is fine...
haha, and yet, everyone keeps going to Europe in August
haha european summers are the best though. long sun hours festivals everywhere. from my travels, i learned the cold countries (well i guess not spain) have the best summer.
haha yeah especially this summer! thanks for the feedback. yeah, the region/country aggregation can be a bit off. i'm still tuning the best parameter for each preset.
My wife is using this to plan her next escape. She loves it! only complaint, she would like to also see a rank by cost (cheap/expensive)
Oh I added that recently! We use Price Level Index from World Bank's International Comparison Program 2021. (US dollars needed to buy the same GDP basket, normalised so World = 100). It's CC BY-4.0 open data. I found it to be a bit inaccurate though. Maybe I'll add big mac index. Numbeo was ruled out on licence and per-call cost.