Travel Alerts MCP — a unified feed for LLMs.

The problem

Travel safety data is fragmented by design. GDACS publishes an XML feed of active natural disasters with color-coded severity. The US State Department runs RSS advisories with a 1–4 scale. FAA NOTAMs use a cryptic Q-code format. The UK FCDO, NOAA, USGS, CDC, and ReliefWeb each publish their own schemas.

Every travel-adjacent assistant I tried to build hit the same wall: to answer a question as basic as "is it safe to travel to Haiti right now?" you have to cross-reference half a dozen sources, normalize three different severity scales, and hope none of them is stale.

Approach

One MCP server. Background pollers fetch each feed on its own cadence; severity is normalized — GDACS color codes (Green/Orange/Red) and State Dept levels (1–4) both collapse to a unified enum. The server exposes two tools:

• list_active_alerts — filtered by country or region, with optional severity floor.
• fetch_alert_details — full text, coordinates, and source URL for a specific alert.

SQLite handles local caching, keyed by (source, source_id) for deduplication across polls.

Architecture

• FastMCP framework over stdio transport, with lifespan management for connection pooling and the background polling loop.
• aiosqlite in WAL mode so readers never block writers.
• Per-source fetchers run in parallel; each one handles its own parse quirks (XML, RSS, JSON).
• Ships the NOTAM Decoder as a submodule — the FAA feed comes in already structured, not as raw Q-code soup.
• Deployed behind HTTPS as an always-on service with background polling.

Status & links

Live at travel-mcp.james-gault.com. New sources get added as their feeds prove stable; the current roster covers GDACS, US State Dept, FAA, NOAA, NWS, UK FCDO, USGS, CDC, and ReliefWeb.