How we check codes

This page describes what actually happens to a travel offer between a merchant feed and the card you see. It is deliberately unflattering in places, because a checking routine that sounds perfect is a checking routine nobody is really running.

1. Where the offers come from

From the merchant feeds travel brands publish through their affiliate networks, and from the brands’ own public campaign pages. Nothing on Travelistory is copied from another coupon site, and no offer is invented, extrapolated or “estimated” from an old one.

2. The screens, in order

1. Is it travel? The brand has to be a travel brand. Feeds file all sorts of things under loose headings, and “other experiences” in particular is a bin that holds everything from vape shops to baby stores. Category labels alone are not trusted; the brand is looked at.
2. Is it for a US traveller? Region has to include the United States. Anything quoted in pounds, euros, rupees, baht, dirhams or any other currency is dropped, and so is anything whose title is not in English.
3. Is it allowed here? Gambling and casino-resort brands, adults-only resorts, vaping, tobacco, cannabis, weapons, prescription pharmacy and high-cost credit are removed. This runs as a keyword sweep over brand names, domains, titles and terms, and then a person reads the survivors.
4. Has it already ended? Anything whose end date has passed never reaches the site at all.
5. Is the code real? Some feeds publish a coupon code masked as ****. There is no code to hand over, so the offer is republished here as a no-code offer rather than as a code that would fail.
6. Does the wording survive reading? Titles arrive with the brand’s name repeated twice, broken emoji, and the coupon code typed into the middle of the sentence. The name is tidied, the code is taken out of the running text and put behind the control where the terms travel with it, and shouted capitals are lowered. No claim is added that the brand did not make.

3. What is printed on the card

Every offer carries the brand’s own end date, or says No end date given where the brand supplied none. A date more than two years out is treated as the feed’s placeholder for “no end date” rather than as a real deadline, because that is what it almost always is. Key conditions sit in plain text on the card; the longer detail is one click away under See Details, never hidden behind a click and never more than one click deep.

4. What happens when an offer ends

It leaves every list on the day it ends. It is excluded from every counter on the site from that moment. It stays visible on its own brand page for 21 days in a block clearly marked as ended, so nobody wonders where it went, and then it unpublishes itself. Ended offers carry a noindex instruction so search engines stop showing them as live.

5. What this routine does not promise

It does not promise that every code was typed into a real travel checkout this morning. Travel brands change, restrict and withdraw promotions without telling anyone, and a code that worked at nine can be refused at ten. What it promises is narrower and true: an offer was read by a person before it went up, it carries the brand’s own end date and terms, and it comes down on the day the brand said it would.

6. When something fails anyway

Tell us. Report a dead code with the brand name and roughly what the checkout said. Reports are read by a person, the offer is taken down while it is checked, and if it is genuinely dead it does not go back up.