The Packing List tool builds a suggested kit list from the climate you can realistically expect at your destination during your travel window, rather than from a generic beach or city template. You pick one of the 24 destinations, set a start and end date, choose how many people are travelling, and optionally tick trip-type presets such as beach, city, hiking or winter sports. The tool then reads the long-run weather for that place and those calendar days and turns it into clothing, sun protection, rain gear, electronics, documents, health and trip-specific items, grouped into checkable categories. The point is to pack for what is typical there at that time of year: the right kit for a Mediterranean island in July is not the right kit for an Arctic-influenced destination in March, and packing for sunshine when the record shows a wet week is how holidays get spoiled. Quantities scale with both the length of the trip and the number of travellers, so a fortnight for two produces larger counts than a long weekend for one. Nothing here is a forecast for your dates; it is an informed starting point you are expected to adjust before you zip the case.
When you generate a list, the tool pulls daily weather for the destination's exact coordinates from the free Open-Meteo Historical Weather API, which serves the ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis. It requests roughly twenty years of records, ending with the last full calendar year and reaching back nineteen years before that, and keeps only the calendar days inside your chosen window. Those days are averaged into a small set of climate statistics: mean, minimum and maximum temperature, wet days per week, sunshine hours per day, peak wind speed, and whether the destination sits in a tropical region. Those statistics feed a fixed rule set. Each candidate item carries a condition tied to the climate, so cold-weather layers appear only when the average daily low falls below a set threshold, a rain jacket and umbrella appear once wet days per week pass their thresholds, a windbreaker appears in consistently windy conditions, sun protection appears when it is both warm and sunny, and a mosquito repellent appears only when it is hot and the region is tropical. Trip-type presets layer specialised gear, such as snorkel kit for beach or thermal underwear and a winter coat for winter sports, on top of the climate-driven base. Per-person items multiply by traveller count, and quantities scale by trip length against a seven-day baseline. The finished list is grouped into categories, and your ticked items and any custom additions are saved per trip in the browser, so reopening the same destination and dates restores your progress.
No. It is built from long-run climate averages, roughly twenty years of historical daily records for your chosen calendar days, not a prediction for your specific dates. That means you should pack for the typical range rather than a single expected day: carry layers, and keep rain or warm items in even when the average looks mild, because individual days will vary around that average.
It comes from the free Open-Meteo Historical Weather API, which serves the ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis, a respected scientific dataset reconstructed from observations and modelling. The tool reads about two decades of daily values at the destination's exact coordinates, keeps the days inside your travel window, and averages them into the temperature, rain, sunshine and wind figures the packing rules use.
The presets are beach, city, hiking and winter sports. Selecting one layers in specialised gear that the weather rules would not otherwise add, such as a beach towel and snorkel kit for beach, hiking boots and a daypack for hiking, or thermal underwear and a winter coat for winter sports. They sit on top of the climate-driven base list rather than replacing it, and you can combine more than one.
Quantities for countable items scale against a seven-day baseline, so a longer trip produces larger numbers and a shorter one smaller. Per-person items, such as underwear, socks and phone chargers, also multiply by the traveller count you set. A fortnight for two therefore generates noticeably higher counts than a three-day trip for one, while single shared items stay at one.
Yes. Your checked items and any custom entries are stored in your own browser, scoped to that specific destination and date combination. Reopening the same trip restores exactly where you left off, while a different destination or a different set of dates starts from a fresh list, so two separate trips do not overwrite each other.
Yes. The tool can copy the whole list to your clipboard as plain text, including the category headings and which items are already ticked, and on devices that support it the native share sheet is offered as well. That makes it straightforward to send the same list to a travel companion or paste it into a notes app for reference.