Travel Workflows: Pre-Trip Automation

Every trip starts the same way: mild dread that you're forgetting something important. The passport. The chargers. The travel adapter. The itinerary. The hotel confirmation. The prescription. The out-of-office. The pet care. The mail hold. Forty small tasks that each cost nothing but collectively consume an evening of mental load.

ClawFlows' travel category exists precisely for this. The workflows in it handle pre-trip prep, packing lists, and travel handoffs — the stuff you keep meaning to systematize but never do because you only travel four or five times a year and it never quite feels worth it.

Key Takeaways

• The Travel category in ClawFlows includes workflows like pre-trip-automation, build-packing-list, and travel-handoff.
• pre-trip-automation handles the pre-departure checklist — out-of-office, mail hold, calendar updates, confirmations.
• build-packing-list generates a trip-specific list based on destination, weather, duration, and trip type.
• Together they eliminate the evening-before scramble that ruins half of most trips.
• The workflows are in nikilster/clawflows and fully customizable.

The Pre-Trip Problem

Travel prep has a specific structure. It's low-stakes individually (nobody dies if you forget socks) but high-cognitive-load collectively (40 small decisions at once). The human brain is exactly wrong-shaped for this — we're good at deep focus on one thing, bad at parallel tracking of many small things.

The solution is to outsource the remembering. Not to a human assistant — to a workflow that knows your patterns and can reconstruct the checklist automatically from trip details.

pre-trip-automation

When you invoke pre-trip-automation with trip dates and destination, the workflow runs through the pre-departure checklist:

1. Sets your out-of-office on email and Slack
2. Blocks your calendar for the travel dates
3. Places a mail hold if configured with your postal service
4. Checks confirmations — flight, hotel, car, activities — and reports any missing ones
5. Downloads offline maps for your destination
6. Queues up travel documents in your preferred viewer
7. Sends a heads-up to anyone on your configured contact list (partner, team lead, pet-sitter)
8. Adjusts smart-home settings if integrated — lights, thermostat, security

You run it the day before you leave. It takes about 90 seconds. What used to be an evening of scattered prep becomes a single command.

build-packing-list

Packing lists are where forgetting happens. build-packing-list generates a list customized to the specific trip:

• Duration — 3-day trip packs differently than 14-day
• Destination weather — pulled from forecast APIs
• Trip type — business, leisure, outdoor, mixed
• Activities — gym, swim, hike, formal dinner
• Accommodations — hotel, airbnb, camping

Based on these inputs, the workflow produces a packing list with counts for each item. The list is derived from a template you customize over time — so your "winter business trip" template improves with every trip.

We cover this workflow in depth in Build-Packing-List: Travel Workflow Deep Dive.

How Does It Learn My Preferences?

It doesn't, exactly — but you can update the template after each trip. If you always forget your passport holder, add it. If you always overpack shirts, reduce the count. Over a few trips, the template converges to your actual travel pattern.

Some users maintain multiple templates — one for business trips, one for family vacations, one for camping — and the workflow picks based on a trip-type parameter.

travel-handoff

For people who leave things behind (pets, plants, kids, home responsibilities), the travel-handoff workflow produces a document for whoever's covering for you. It includes:

• Emergency contacts
• Medication schedules
• Feeding instructions
• House notes (alarm codes, trash day, etc.)
• Your itinerary so they know when you're unreachable

This is the kind of document you always mean to write and never do, because it's boring and the deadline is fuzzy. The workflow makes it a 60-second task.

The Full Pre-Trip Routine

The way I use the travel workflows in sequence:

1. One week out: Run build-packing-list to see what I need. Buy anything I'm missing.
2. Two days out: Run it again with updated weather to refine the list.
3. Day before: Run pre-trip-automation to handle the checklist tasks.
4. Day before: Run travel-handoff if anyone's covering for me.
5. Morning of: Final glance at the packing list, grab everything, go.

Total prep time across all of that: about 15 minutes spread over a week. Total pre-trip anxiety: essentially zero because I know the workflow caught everything.

Customization Examples

Some ways people customize travel workflows:

• A pet owner added steps to brief the sitter and prepay for pet food delivery
• A digital nomad added a step to verify VPN works in the destination country
• A photographer added camera-gear sections to the packing template based on trip type
• A parent added kid-specific packing lists by child age
• A business traveler added expense-report prep steps to travel-handoff

We walk through authoring your own customizations in Writing Your First Custom ClawFlow.

Pairing With Other Workflows

Travel workflows pair well with:

• activate-focus-mode — run pre-trip prep in a dedicated focus block (see Focus Mode: The Workflow That Saved My Week)
• backup-photos — run before you go so you start the trip with a clean backup baseline (covered in Backup Workflows: Never Lose a Photo Again)
• end-workday — run the last workday before a trip with extra handoff steps
• activate-sleep-mode — because good sleep the night before travel matters

FAQ

Does it work for international travel?

Yes. International trips get additional checks — passport expiration, visa requirements (from a public API), currency, and power adapter type for the destination country.

What if I don't use all the features?

Remove steps from the workflow definition you don't want. It's designed to be opt-in by default; you configure which steps run.

Can it actually set my out-of-office?

Yes, if you've configured an email skill with the right permissions. The workflow composes the OOO message based on your inputs (dates, contact for urgent, etc.) and calls the email skill to set it.

How does weather integration work?

It calls a public weather API with your destination and trip dates. Based on the forecast, it adjusts the packing list (more layers if cold, rain gear if wet, etc.).

Is it free?

Yes. ClawFlows is open source MIT-licensed from nikilster/clawflows. Some weather or document APIs have free tiers that are plenty for personal use.

Never Forget Anything Again

If pre-trip anxiety is a regular cost in your life, the travel workflows are worth the 20 minutes it takes to install ClawFlows and configure your first trip. Install it (see How to Install ClawFlows in One Command), set up a template, and run it before your next trip. You'll never go back to manual prep.

Explore all 113 workflows at aiskill.market/workflows or submit your own.

Sources

• nikilster/clawflows on GitHub — source for travel workflows
• OpenClaw documentation
• 113 Workflows That Run Your Digital Life
• Focus Mode Spotlight
• Anthropic Claude docs