Welcome to Mara

Hi, I'm Chase, and I built Mara. This is the first post on the blog, so it felt right to start at the beginning: what Mara is, what she does, and a few things she won't do.

I built Mara to keep the trip and the planning in one place. Map out your days, save places you want to visit, and let her keep an eye on the price. When you need a hand, just ask.

“Is this a good price?” and “Can we fit dinner in here on Thursday?” are both good places to start.

Let's walk through a trip: a week in Punta Cana for two, flying from Calgary in February. The prices below are examples, but the demos work like the app. Click around and try things.

What is Mara?

You can use Mara just to plan, just to watch a price, or for both. Link a Tracker to your Trip and the latest price sits beside your plans. When you talk to her, she can see it all too.

Explore helps you pick a place. Plan is where the trip lives, one day at a time. Track keeps an eye on the price. Ask Mara is the chat that connects them, and she answers from your own Trips and Trackers. Journal keeps the trips you take, each one a Stamp with its Days and Photos.

Mara is the name of the app and also the name of who you talk to inside it. She's an AI, and she's built to stick to what she actually knows about your trip. I'm building Mara in Canada, for travellers around the world.

Start with a place

Most trips start as a vague wish. Somewhere warm, not too far, not too expensive. Explore turns that into a short list.

You tell Mara the month, how long you're willing to fly, what you want to spend and what kind of trip you're after. She scores the destinations she knows against those answers and puts the best fits first. When she has recent prices for a place, she shows them too, with the date she saw them.

Here's our February trip. Switch the preferences on and off and watch the list change:

With only the budget switched on, Punta Cana comes out on top. Add a short flight and Puerto Vallarta takes over, because Punta Cana is seven and a half hours from Calgary. Explore is good at showing you that kind of trade. We're going with Punta Cana.

Plan the days

Once you've picked a place, you start a Trip. A Trip holds the facts: where you're going, when, who's coming and the budget. Inside it is the Itinerary, which is your days in order. Each Day has Stops, like a flight landing, a snorkel or a dinner. Where you sleep is the Stay, and anything you like but haven't placed yet waits in Ideas.

You can build all of it by hand. You can also ask Mara for a first draft and change whatever you like. Here are the first four days of ours:

The small ~ times between Stops are rough estimates. On the real Trip page, the list sits beside a Google map with a pin for every Stop, and those estimates turn into real driving or walking times once the Day is routed. Open a Stop that's tied to a real place and you'll see its rating, hours and photos without leaving the page. When the plan is ready, you can send a read-only link to whoever's coming. It shows the days and the places and keeps your notes, costs and bookings to yourself.

The itinerary planner page goes deeper on maps, routes and sharing.

Watch the price

This is the part Mara started with. Package prices move all the time, and a single look tells you almost nothing. A price only means something next to other prices.

A Tracker gives you those. You tell Mara the trip: where you're leaving from, where you're going, the dates and who's travelling. She checks the price once a day on a free account and keeps every result, so after a few weeks you have a real history of that exact trip. Pro checks more often.

Drag along the line, or use the slider, to go back through our Punta Cana checks:

When something worth knowing happens, you hear about it by email and in the app. The price drops, it hits a new low, or it goes under the most you said you'd pay. Trackers work for cruises too. Pick where you want to sail and the month you want to leave, and she watches the sailings.

The price tracker page has the details.

Ask Mara

Ask Mara is the chat, and what makes her useful is what she reads. She answers from your own Trips and Trackers, so when you ask about a price, she's looking at the checks she recorded for you. Pick a question:

She can do the setup, too. Ask her to track a trip and she fills in the Tracker for you to check before anything is saved. Ask for a week in Punta Cana and she drafts the Trip. When she hasn't seen enough to answer well, she tells you that instead of filling the gap.

You can try Ask Mara without an account.

What Mara won't do

A few lines I drew on purpose:

• She won't make up a price. Every price in Mara comes from a real check of a travel provider's site.
• She won't guess where a price is going. She'll tell you where today's price sits against everything she's seen. Tomorrow's price is anyone's guess, and she doesn't pretend otherwise.
• She won't book or pay for anything. When you're ready to buy, Mara sends you to the provider's own site and you book there.
• She won't mark anything as booked. Only you can set a Stop to Reserved and add the confirmation number.

New: Journal

Update, October 2026: Journal is here. I said I'd post when it was ready, and here's that post.

Journal is where a trip lives once you've gone. Each trip you take can become a Stamp: a small postage stamp with the place, the month and year, and an illustration of the thing you want to remember, like the tiny ramen shop you found on the second night. Pick an illustration from Mara's house set, then open the Stamp to write each Day up and keep its Photos with it. Trips from before Mara work too. When you want to show someone, send the Stamp home as a read-only link.

Getting started

You can get started for free with three Trackers checked daily, one Trip at a time and 20 messages a day with Mara. Plan a trip, watch the price and see how it works for you. If you need more room, Pro will raise those limits and check prices more often. You can join the waitlist now.

Creating an account takes a couple of minutes, or you can try Ask Mara first without one.

Quick answers

Thanks for being here at the start. I'll have more to share soon.