About

If you’ve ever tried to plan around the school holidays, you’ll know the routine. Your state’s website gives you term dates, so you do the maths on the gaps yourself. Public holidays live on a different page, so you look those up separately. And when a public holiday does land, there’s still the question nobody answers: is everything actually open that day? None of it is hard, exactly. It’s just harder than it should be, and the pages don’t help.

onhollies started because I wanted that to be easier: school and public holidays together, worked out for you, presented the way you actually think about them. And once I began, I got excited by what happens when every state and territory sits in one place, because the dates stop being a chore to look up and start being a plan you can make.

Because the real question was never when the holidays are. It’s what you’re going to do with them. Where you might go. What’s on nearby that’s fun to do together if you’re staying home. How the care will work across the weeks you can’t take off, whether that’s family, a holiday program or something in between. That’s the job onhollies is really for: helping you feel organised about the break, and making the planning part of the fun. It’s the part I’m deep in building now, starting with a researched guide to family destinations, what each place is genuinely good for, what things really cost and when the seasons actually work.

How I build it

I’m Jesse, a solo builder from Brisbane who’s passionate about solving meaningful problems and making people’s lives better. My rule is to do the searching the way I’d do it for my own family, so you don’t have to: heaps of sources, brought into one place, with the reading already done. I use AI tools to help find and check sources, and every fact has to trace back to an official or operator page before it ships. When a source doesn’t say something, neither do we. Drive and flight times are estimates. Free means you can turn up and pay nothing, and where a park pass or permit stands between you and a free walk, we say exactly that. For the things that change day to day, we tell you the pattern that makes or breaks a trip and point you at the page that’s live today. And where an experience belongs to the people whose culture it shares, naming them is part of the story, and when I’m not sure how to get that right, I ask.

The dream is simple to say and big to do: improve the lives of millions of people, by saving them time planning, making the experience genuinely enjoyable and helping them get the most from their time away from work. More out of the holidays, and more out of life.

Where it all comes from

Every date, place and venue on onhollies traces back to a source we can point to. Sources explains where each kind of fact comes from and how we keep it current, with the main government sources, state by state.

If you spot something that looks wrong, please tell me. Accuracy matters more than anything else here.