How we decide whether a partner makes the Away Mode list
Sparkfare may earn a commission if you buy through the links below, at no extra cost to you. Read our disclosure.
We've applied to more travel-services affiliate programs than we've actually added to Away Mode. That gap is deliberate, not a backlog we haven't gotten to — here's the actual bar a partner has to clear before it shows up.
It has to solve a real "leaving for a trip" problem
Every partner on the list maps to something that genuinely happens when you leave home for a while: medical coverage you might need abroad, a bag you need to store for a few hours, mail that keeps arriving whether you're there or not. We're not trying to build a general shopping mall — if a service doesn't map to a real pre-trip or during-trip need, it doesn't belong here regardless of the commission.
The link has to be real, not guessed
We only add a partner once an application is actually approved and we have a real, working tracking link in hand. A guessed link format, or a placeholder pointing at a generic signup page instead of a real affiliate URL, would silently break commission tracking — worse than not listing the partner at all. Several partners on our own internal shortlist are still pending approval or application for exactly this reason; they're not on the live list yet, and won't be until there's a real link to show.
Disclosure comes first, every time
Every Away Mode link, on every page and in every email that lists one, appears after our FTC-style disclosure, not before. That ordering isn't decorative — an earlier version of our daily email template actually had this backwards, and we fixed it as soon as we found it.
Why the list is short
Thirteen real, live, working partners you can actually trust beat a wall of logos where half are placeholders or programs we haven't heard back from yet. We'd rather grow the list slowly and honestly than pad it for the sake of looking comprehensive.