LEGAL
Terms of Service
Last updated:
These terms describe what travelers.so does, what you are agreeing to when you use it, and what happens to your money when you book a trip.
1. What travelers.so is
travelers.so is a travel marketplace. Travel advisors use it to search live airline and accommodation inventory, assemble a trip, price it, and send it to a traveler as a proposal. Travelers use it to browse destinations, talk to an automated travel agent, and review and pay for a proposal an advisor has built for them.
travelers.so is not an airline, a hotel, or a tour operator. We do not operate any flight, room, or transfer. Whoever operates the service you have booked is the one who performs it, and their own conditions of carriage or terms of stay govern how they perform it.
2. Booking is not switched on yet
At the time of writing, travelers.so cannot take a payment or issue a ticket. The booking path is disabled. You can search, receive a proposal, and see real prices, but the checkout page will tell you that booking is unavailable and point you at an advisor instead.
Every section below that describes paying, booking, cancelling, or being refunded describes how the service works when booking is enabled. Until then, no part of it has happened to anyone.
3. Who you are contracting with
This is the most important thing to understand, because three companies are involved and they do different jobs.
- You pay travelers.so. The total shown at checkout is collected from your card by Stripe, into a travelers.so account. Your card statement shows a travelers.so charge, and travelers.so is the business you bought from.
- Duffel books and pays the airline. travelers.so sends your booking to Duffel, an airline booking platform, and Duffel pays the airline the fare out of a balance travelers.so funds in advance. Duffel holds the airline industry accreditation that makes issuing a ticket possible; travelers.so does not hold that accreditation and does not issue tickets itself.
- The airline carries you. Your ticket is an airline ticket with an airline booking reference. What the airline will and will not do — changes, refunds, delays, baggage — is set by its fare rules and its conditions of carriage, not by travelers.so.
The practical consequence: travelers.so can ask the airline, through Duffel, to cancel or change a booking, and can pass on whatever the airline agrees to. travelers.so cannot make an airline do something its own fare rules do not allow.
TO BE COMPLETED — legal entity and registered address
The legal name of the company operating travelers.so, its company registration number, and its registered address must be stated here. Until they are, this document does not identify the party you would be contracting with.
TO BE COMPLETED — seller-of-travel registration
Several US states run seller-of-travel registration regimes — California, Florida, Washington, Hawaii, and Iowa among them — and some require a registration number to be displayed. A lawyer must determine which apply and the numbers must be listed here before money is taken from travelers in those states.
4. Your account
Signing in uses an emailed one-time code. There is no password: you enter your email address, we ask our authentication provider to email you a code, and entering that code signs you in. Your account is created the first time you successfully use a code.
Because there is no password, control of your email inbox is control of your travelers.so account. Keep your inbox secure. Signing out revokes the session on our side, not only in your browser.
Everyone starts as a traveler. Becoming an advisor is a separate, explicit step that we grant; you cannot elevate your own account.
5. How a price is put together
The total you are asked to pay is made up of three parts:
- The supplier cost — what the airline charges for the fare, read live from the supplier at the moment you are quoted.
- The advisor markup— the advisor’s margin on that fare, set by the advisor either as a percentage or a fixed amount.
- The service fee— a flat fee for the advisor’s work putting the trip together.
You are shown the total you will pay and, separately, the service fee. You are not shown the split between the airline’s fare and the advisor’s markup. That split is our commercial margin and we do not publish it. What we will not do is show you a total that is not the total: no part of what you pay is added after the figure you agreed to.
You never send us a price. Markup and service fee are worked out on our servers from the advisor’s own terms, and the fare is re-read from the supplier rather than taken from a search result that may have gone stale.
6. Quotes expire, and prices can move
A quote is frozen for a maximum of fifteen minutes, or until the airline’s own offer expires, whichever comes first. Airline offers are short-lived; a fare quoted an hour ago may no longer exist.
If the price has changed since the figure you were last shown, we stop and show you both numbers. We will not quietly charge you a different amount: you have to accept the new total explicitly before anything proceeds. If the quote lapses before you pay, the booking does not go through and any hold on your card is released.
7. Payment: authorized first, charged only on confirmation
When you pay, your card is authorized for the total but not charged. That places a hold on the funds. We then ask the airline to issue the booking. Only once the airline has confirmed it is your card actually charged.
If the airline refuses the booking, the hold is released and you are never charged at all. There is no payment to refund and no dispute to raise, because no money ever moved. This is deliberate: the alternative is taking your money and then apologising.
Occasionally the airline’s answer is neither yes nor no — a network failure at exactly the wrong moment. In that case we do not resend the booking, because resending it could book you twice. Your authorization stays in place while we query the airline to find out what actually happened, and the booking is then either completed or released. You may see “we are confirming your booking” while that resolves.
8. Passenger details are your responsibility
Names must match the passport or identity document each traveler will present at the airport. Airlines charge to correct a name, and some will not correct one at all — they will require a new ticket. We pass the details you give us to the airline as you typed them.
Travel documents, visas, and entry requirements are yours to satisfy. travelers.so does not check whether you are permitted to enter a country, and the automated travel agent’s answers about entry requirements are not authoritative.
9. Advisors
An advisor is an independent person or business using travelers.so to build and sell trips. The advisor sets their own markup and service fee. The itinerary, the recommendations, and the advice are theirs.
When you buy an advisor’s proposal, you still pay travelers.so and travelers.so is still the business you bought from. The advisor is not a separate seller taking your card details.
10. The automated travel agent
travelers.so includes an AI assistant that searches live inventory and answers questions. Its flight and stay results come from a real supplier, and it is built to refuse rather than invent a price it does not have. Its prose is still generated text and can be wrong, out of date, or confidently mistaken.
Do not treat it as authoritative on visas, entry rules, health requirements, or anything else where being wrong has consequences. Check with the airline or the relevant authority.
Your conversations are stored against your account so you can come back to them. See the Privacy Policy.
11. Acceptable use
Do not use travelers.so to:
- book travel for someone whose details you are not entitled to use;
- attempt to access another user’s account, proposal, or booking;
- scrape, automate, or otherwise drive our supplier searches in bulk — each search costs us money and is rate limited;
- interfere with the service, its security controls, or its rate limits.
We may suspend an account that does any of these. Advisor accounts can also be suspended without deleting the advisor’s record.
12. Cancellation and refunds
Cancellation and refunds are covered in full by the Refund and Cancellation Policy, which forms part of these terms. In short: you receive what the airline returns, and the advisor markup and service fee are retained. Read that page before you book.
13. Changes to these terms
We may update these terms. The date at the top of this page is the date of the version you are reading. A booking is governed by the terms in force when it was made.
TO BE COMPLETED — notice of material changes
Decide and state how travelers are told about a material change — email to all account holders, an in-product notice, or a notice period — and record that decision here.
14. Clauses this draft deliberately does not contain
The following are missing on purpose. Each one is a clause where a wrong guess is worse than a gap, and none of them can responsibly be written by anyone other than a qualified lawyer.
TO BE COMPLETED — limitation of liability and warranty disclaimers
No limitation of liability, exclusion of damages, or warranty disclaimer appears anywhere in this draft. Their scope and enforceability depend on the governing law and on consumer-protection rules that vary by jurisdiction, and an unenforceable limitation can be worse than none.
TO BE COMPLETED — governing law and jurisdiction
Which country’s or state’s law governs these terms, and which courts hear a dispute, is unstated. It is a genuine legal decision that depends on where the operating entity is established and where travelers are sold to.
TO BE COMPLETED — dispute resolution
No arbitration clause, class-action waiver, or complaints procedure is included. Arbitration provisions in particular have strict drafting and disclosure requirements in several jurisdictions.
TO BE COMPLETED — indemnities and insurance
No indemnity runs in either direction, and nothing here states whether travel insurance is required, offered, or recommended.
15. Contact
TO BE COMPLETED — support contact
A support email address and a postal address for legal notice must be stated here. Right now this document gives a traveler no way to reach anyone, which is the first thing a payment processor will ask about.