How it works
What is built, what is designed, and what is deliberately blocked.
Most pre-launch products blur these three. Keeping them apart in public is cheap insurance: nobody can accuse us of implying a booking engine or a fund that does not exist, and anybody evaluating this can see the actual state in one screen.
Four doors
Discover, then understand, then experience, then journey. Each one is only worth anything once the one before it has happened — which is why this is a sequence and not a menu, and why it is not search-then-book.
Door one
Discover
Find places. Fifty countries, their travel regions and their cities — including the ones nobody puts on a list.
Door two
Understand
Learn the story behind them. Why a valley speaks a different language from the next one, and why the market starts before sunrise.
Door three
Experience
Find the things to do, the people to meet and the cultures to encounter — sorted by what you actually travel for.
Door four
Journey
Turn discovery into a route: your days, your budget, your interests, costed and ordered, with the distances between stops made honest.
Built and live
Europe Atlas
50 countries, 130 regions, 319 cities, all generated from one dataset
Journey Planner
Runs in the browser against the whole Atlas; scores fit, respects distance, estimates cost
European Journeys
17 curated cross-border routes with validated night counts
Themes
13 experience-first routes that ignore borders
Map
Point map of every city, filterable, no third-party tiles
Experience listings
Ten kinds, tiered, with the verification model published
Europe Experience Score
Six dimensions, formula published on /method
Stories
Editorial desk with pieces linked into the Atlas
My Europe
Saved places, in your browser only
Events
The recurring European year, by month
Search
The whole index, filtered in your browser; nothing you type is sent anywhere
Designed, not built
Specified in docs/product-specification.md in the repository, with schemas and flows. Not shipped.
AI planner
Retrieval over this dataset only, with citations and a refusal when the data is silent — never free-form generation about Europe
Accounts
Sync, shareable lists, planner integration. Needs a controller and a privacy notice first
Business directory
Free / Professional / Premium tiers, claimable profiles, editorial wall stated
Bookings & commission
Operator sets price and keeps the customer; 10–15% intended
Europe Fund
Public register of projects; no custody of money, and no balance shown until three gates clear
Multilingual
Ten languages, localisation rather than machine translation of destination copy
Deliberately blocked
Each of these is one decision away from possible and is being held shut on purpose until the thing in the middle column exists.
Taking a payment
Requires an incorporated entity, a named payee on every card surface, and a PSP contract
Holding contributions
Requires the above plus a written position on the treatment of contributions in each collecting country
Storing business or user data
Requires a data controller, a lawful basis and a published privacy notice
Naming an operating company anywhere on the site
There is not one yet, so no page names one
The AI rule, in one paragraph
When the AI planner ships, it will not be a chat window with a model behind it. The pipeline is: intent extraction from what you typed → a query against this dataset → a route computed by the same distance code that runs the planner today → and only then a model, whose job is to write the itinerary it was handed. If the dataset has nothing for a request, the answer is "we do not cover that yet", not an invention. A travel platform that hallucinates a train connection is worse than no travel platform.