Vaccines, customs: how we keep travel requirements up to date for 250 destinations

Our destination pages now include two new sections: vaccine recommendations and customs allowances. Here’s how we reconcile conflicting official sources to provide accurate, reliable travel information.

Behind those few lines you see listed by country lies a question we ask ourselves with every update: when two official sources contradict each other, which one do we publish?

The problem: sources don’t always align

Take South Africa as a random example from our checks in September.

The Timatic database, maintained by airlines and used by check-in agents worldwide, states that you may enter with 25,000 rand in local currency and unlimited foreign currency as long as amounts over $10,000 are declared.

On the other hand, the South African Revenue Service (SARS) publishes a single threshold of 100,000 rand since 1 July 2026—whether in local or foreign currency—above which declaration is mandatory and prior approval from the Reserve Bank is required.

Both sources are official. Both are current. Yet they don’t agree because they answer different questions: Timatic outlines what the carrier must check before boarding, while SARS specifies what the tax authority requires at the border. A traveler reading one without the other only gets half the picture.

Such discrepancies aren’t rare—they’re the norm. That’s precisely why a clear written rule is better than ad hoc interpretation.

Our rule: one source per topic, and it doesn’t change

Each topic has one designated source, and just one. No blurred consensus from multiple websites, no cherry-picking based on perceived recency.

For customs allowances, it’s the website of the local customs authority. Only four fields are filled: alcohol, tobacco, currency, and medicines. We never supplement these entries because combining two frameworks in a single line produces information whose origin becomes impossible to trace.

For vaccines, we use two sources: the US CDC and the Institut Pasteur.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is deliberately excluded. Its most recent country-by-country list dates to 2022, and a four-year-old dataset has no place in pages meant to be up to date.

This discipline sometimes means leaving a field blank. Instead of writing “check with the consulate” or inventing a generic allowance, we leave it empty—because an empty cell tells the truth: this source doesn’t document this point. A filler sentence, by contrast, is not.

What we don’t publish

Three filters remove more lines than they add.

First, we exclude generic reminders. The CDC publishes identical text across its 235 country pages covering vaccination schedules, COVID-19, and measles. Repeating that block on every destination would create the illusion of depth without adding location-specific insight.

Second, we omit guidance that applies only to long-term stays. Recommendations meant solely for relocation or stays of six months or longer aren’t relevant to a two-week trip, so we don’t include them.

Third and most important, we distinguish between recommendations and actual entry requirements—and this distinction is critical. Out of 1,545 vaccine lines, 144 are real entry mandates enforceable at a border, while 1,401 are medical recommendations. Misinterpreting the two is the top source of confusion among travelers. A yellow fever certificate required on arrival in Angola is not the same as a hepatitis A vaccine recommended for a visit to Morocco, and our pages make that clear.

This distinction also explains why we don’t list summer health alerts as obligations. In September 2026, active advisories—from the Bundibugyo ebolavirus in Democratic Republic of the Congo to yellow fever in Venezuela and Colombia—are all vaccination recommendations. None impose a proof-of-vaccination requirement at the border. Promoting them to mandates would be dramatic—and wrong.

Out of 250 countries in our database, customs allowances cover 230 destinations and vaccine info covers 227. The gaps aren’t oversights.

Twenty territories have no customs entry: some aren’t covered by any source, others receive their neighbor’s page. The Faroe Islands and Greenland, for example, inherit Denmark’s page, which mentions rules for those territories but never displays them. Publishing Denmark’s allowances under the Faroe Islands would be plausible—and false. We’d rather leave the line blank.

On the vaccine side, 10 destinations have no entries in either the CDC or the Institut Pasteur. Others, like Antarctica or the Vatican, rightly result in zero lines: there’s simply nothing to recommend for a short stay. An empty page is a result, not a failure.

What happens when a country changes its rules

Each line shows its last verification date and the exact URL of the page we read that day. All 230 customs sheets have been reviewed.

For visas, which change even more frequently, we also archive the full text of source pages with a digital fingerprint of the content. Whenever that fingerprint changes, the destination is flagged for review.

Our trigger isn’t a news alert but the source itself: the day a ministry rewrites its page, we know, and someone will read what changed.

This system has one limitation we acknowledge: it detects when a page has been updated, not when a policy decision has been made. Between the announcement of a measure and its publication on the competent authority’s website, weeks may pass. That’s why a blog post often beats a database in speed, and why both content types complement rather than replace one another.

The site’s languages are written from the same source, never translated through a chain of languages. A figure that is accurate in French and incorrect in Spanish would be harder to spot than a missing data point.

You’ll find these two new sections on every destination page, and vaccine recommendations are also gathered on our vaccine travel page. For the South Africa example above, the online travel declaration made mandatory from 1 July 2026 is covered in a dedicated article.