About · Coterra
June 2026. YYZ preclearance. A packing list that didn't know my son was 14 months old.
Three different airline apps for one family's flights. A CBP container surprise we found out about at security. A packing list that didn't know our son was 14 months old. We came home and started building the tooling we wished we had on that trip.
The trip
What happened on that weekend in Toronto.
We flew Toronto with our wife and our 14-month-old son in early June 2026. Three PNRs in three airline apps — mine, my wife's, our son's lap-infant ticket linked to her booking. No single view of where any of us were on departure morning. Gate changes on her phone. Status on mine. The lap-infant ticket nowhere either of us could see.
At YYZ preclearance, two of the containers we packed for the return came out wrong. Not the carry-on liquids rule — the CBP container restriction on what we'd planned to bring back. We found out about it at the security line, not before packing. The rule itself was clear, in plain English, on the CBP site. It just wasn't in any of the four apps we checked before the trip.
The packing list problem was the third one. We'd used a generic list from a parenting blog. It assumed a kid old enough to walk and chew table food. Our son was 14 months old and on a specific formula. The list had no idea, because no consumer packing list knows how old your kid is on the day of the trip.
What Coterra is
Boring deterministic tooling for the trip you’re actually taking.
Coterra is a family travel companion for parents who used to travel internationally without thinking and are now ~12–36 months into figuring out how to do the same trips with a young child. The voice is plainspoken. The answers cite the actual government rule they came from with a “last verified” date. The product is built around the friction your last trip surfaced, not the one a marketing team imagined.
When we use AI, we say so, and we name the narrow job — reading the airline emails you forward, drafting a starting packing list. The AI never sees your name, your kid's birthday, or your address. The customs answers, the rules, the trip-rhythm thresholds — deterministic, not AI-guessed.
- Customs lookup.“Can I bring this back?” answered with the cited CBP / USDA / CATSA rule. Canada at launch; Mexico, EU, Brazil, Japan follow.
- Family flights. Forward each airline confirmation. Coterra parses the PNRs, resolves the codeshares, links the lap-infant ticket to the right parent, and shows the whole family in one view.
- Emergency card.The destination embassy, the nearest pediatric-capable hospital, your kids' allergies and current medications, the 24-hour insurance claim line. Lives on your phone. Works offline.
What Coterra isn’t
A few things we’d rather not be mistaken for.
We're not a worldschooling company. We're not a travel-influencer brand. We're not a team of travel-industry veterans with a corporate roadmap. We're one parent who learned to ship software somewhere along the way, building the boring tooling he wanted on that Canada trip.
We don't do passport-expiry tracking. TripIt Pro does that well for $49 a year. We don't claim to be all-in-one. The point of Coterra is the four or five things a parent traveling internationally actually hits, done with the care those moments deserve.
If you’re taking an international trip with kids in the next 90 days
I’d like to build this with you.
I'm looking for five families who are taking an international trip with kids in the next 90 days to test Coterra alongside me. No deck, no demo, no sales theatre. Reply to the waitlist confirmation email and tell me where you're going. I'd like 30 minutes of your time before your trip and 30 minutes after.
— Sean