A quick tutorial on how to use the open-source MAQAMI Travel MCP server to give Claude real-world agency.
AI agents are incredibly smart, but they have one massive limitation: they are trapped in a chat box. They can give you travel advice, but they can't actually book the hotel for you.
Until now.
With the release of Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP), we can finally give Claude tools to take action in the real world.
Today, I'm excited to share an open-source project we built: the MAQAMI Travel MCP Server. It exposes live pricing, availability, and direct booking links for over 3 million hotels across 249 countries directly to your AI agent.
Here is how you can set it up in under 3 minutes.
🛠️ What it can do
Once connected, your Claude Desktop app gets access to 65 powerful travel tools. You can literally just type:
"Find me a 5-star hotel in Dubai near the Burj Khalifa for next weekend under $300 a night."
Claude will intelligently use the MCP server to:
Search live inventory.
Fetch the exact pricing and photos.
Generate a direct booking link for you to complete the transaction.
(Insert your screenshot here showing Claude successfully running a hotel search!)
🚀 How to Install (No API Keys Required)
The best part? You don't need any complex API keys or environment variables to get started. The server is completely public and runs via Server-Sent Events (SSE).
Step 1: Open your Claude config
If you are using Claude Desktop, open your configuration file:
Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json
Step 2: Add the MAQAMI Server
https://github.com/negm17111995/mcp-server
Copy and paste this snippet into your mcpServers object:
json
{
"mcpServers": {
"maqami-travel": {
"command": "npx",
"args": [
"-y",
"@modelcontextprotocol/server-sse",
"https://mcp.maqami.co/sse"
]
}
}
}
Step 3: Restart Claude
Completely close the Claude Desktop app and open it again. You will now see a little "hammer" icon indicating that Claude has access to the MAQAMI tools!
🧑💻 The Magic Behind It
If you're curious about how this works under the hood, the server exposes endpoints like post_hotels_rates and get_data_hotel. When you ask a natural language question, Claude figures out the exact parameters (like destination codes, check-in dates, and currency) and fires the API request through the MCP proxy.
It effectively turns Claude into a fully autonomous travel agent that doesn't hallucinate pricing, because it's fetching real-time data from the MAQAMI global inventory.
🔗 Try it out and contribute!
We are just scratching the surface of what Agentic AI can do.
If you want to play around with it, you can check out the source code and documentation on GitHub: 👉 MAQAMI MCP Server Repository
Let me know in the comments if you build anything cool with it, or if you have any feature requests! If you find it useful, a ⭐️ on GitHub goes a long way.
Happy building! 🚀
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