August 12, 2026
Someone calls in December. They want to buy a friend a snorkel trip for the holidays, but the friend won't travel until spring. Can you sell them a gift card?
Yes — and it's one of the few things in this business that puts cash in your account before you run a single tour. But gift cards for tour operators come with rules and traps that generic "gift cards for small business" advice never untangles for an experience-based company. Get the terms wrong and you can lose money on a partial redemption, a no-show, or a state law you didn't know applied to you.
Here's how to sell them the smart way.
Start with the money. A gift card is paid for today and redeemed later — sometimes much later, sometimes never. That's working capital, and it lands hardest in your favor during the off-season, when a slow month can still bring in sales for trips you'll run when you're busy again.
Then there's breakage — the industry word for cards that never get used. Across retail, roughly 10% to 19% of gift-card balances sit unredeemed at any given time and about 6% are never touched at all, according to The Hustle. Tour and activity vouchers run far hotter than that. Palisis reports that about 40% of gift vouchers sold by tour operators are never redeemed. When that happens, you were paid for a tour you never had to run, and the slot stayed open for another paying guest.
The guests who do show up are worth more, too. According to oXYGen Financial, 75% of people who redeem a gift card end up spending more than its face value, overspending by an average of $59. So a gift-voucher guest tends to be more valuable than a same-price cash booking once they're standing on the dock.
Treat gift cards as a deliberate cash-flow and off-season tool, not a nice-to-have widget. Just set them up carefully.
Before you print anything, decide which kind of voucher you're actually selling. The booking-software vendor Enjovia draws a clean line between two types, and the difference shapes everything that follows.
A monetary voucher carries a stated cash value — say $150 — that a guest can put toward any eligible tour. It's flexible, but it invites questions about remaining balances, what's eligible, and who pays the difference when the tour costs more than the card.
An experience voucher is a named trip or bundle — "one sunset cruise for two" — with no dollar figure on it. It sidesteps balance math, but it raises different questions: what happens if that exact tour is sold out, or the guest wants to swap it for something else?
Neither is better. But you have to pick one, because the choice decides which legal rules apply to you and how you word your terms — especially the line about who covers the gap on an upgrade. The rest of this guide follows that fork.
The baseline rule is the Credit CARD Act of 2009. It sets a federal floor: a store gift card or general-use prepaid card can't expire earlier than five years after it was issued or the date funds were last loaded, whichever is later, according to LegalClarity. It also reins in inactivity and dormancy fees, so you can't quietly nibble a card down to zero while it sits in a drawer.
In plain terms: if you sell a $100 gift card, you're generally committing to honor that $100 for at least five years. That's the floor. Two things can move it — a carve-out that works in your favor, and state laws that push the other way.
Here's the part almost no operator knows. The CARD Act's protections only apply to cards issued "in a specified amount." A certificate sold for a specific good, service, or experience — a massage, a fixed-price dinner, or, by direct analogy, a named tour — with no stated dollar value is exempt from the federal expiration and fee rules entirely, and falls to state law only, according to Blackgarden Law.
Why the carve-out? Regulators reasoned that forcing an operator to honor an undated "experience" certificate for five years would push them to overprice it up front just to cover future cost increases. So they left it out.
What this means for you is simple. A voucher that says "one snorkel tour" with no price on it is a named-experience voucher, and you can set your own reasonable expiration on it (subject to your state). A voucher that says "$100" is a stated-value card, and you generally can't. That single wording choice — dollar figure or no dollar figure — quietly decides how much freedom you have.
Federal law is the floor, not the whole story. Several states go further, and a few of them matter a lot for anyone sitting on unused voucher balances.
First, escheatment — a clunky word for a real problem. In states including Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, West Virginia, and Wyoming, the state can claim an unredeemed gift-card balance as unclaimed property after three to five years — even if the card carries no printed expiration date — according to Gift Card Laws by State. That breakage you were counting as a windfall may not be entirely yours to keep.
A few states also set their own generous terms:
The takeaway: check your own state before you assume the five-year federal rule is all you need to follow. It usually isn't.
Everything so far is about selling the card. The money is usually lost at redemption — the moment the guest shows up to actually book. These are the two scenarios the generic guides skip, and they're exactly where a tour operator gets pinched.
Someone books a $200 tour with a $150 monetary voucher. Who pays the other $50, and how? Decide this before you ever sell a card, and write it into your terms.
The most common answer, and the cleanest, is that the guest pays the difference by credit card at checkout. That's exactly how the real tour-marketplace gift card ToursGift/TripGift handles it: it allows only two gift-card codes per transaction, requires any balance beyond the card's value to be paid by credit card, and is non-refundable and non-replaceable if lost, stolen, or if the booking is canceled, per its terms on Office Depot. Borrow that language — it's battle-tested.
Watch the flip side, too. In a state like Massachusetts, if a guest has already spent 90% of a card's value, they can demand the leftover in cash rather than let it ride toward another trip. Knowing that ahead of time keeps a small remainder from turning into an awkward conversation. Whatever you decide, make the balance-due step automatic rather than a manual invoice — the same discipline that lets you automate deposits and balance-due reminders applies here.
This is the one that quietly costs operators money. A gift card is cash-equivalent for the tour — but it is not a card on file for a no-show fee or a last-minute cancellation charge. A guest who prepaid with a voucher and then never shows has, in effect, paid you for the trip. But if they cancel at the last minute and you have a policy that charges a fee, you've got nothing to charge it against.
The fix is straightforward: require a credit card at the time of booking, even when the tour itself is fully prepaid with a gift card. The voucher covers the trip; the card on file covers the fee if they no-show or cancel late. It's the same logic you'd use to cut no-shows with deposits and reminders on a normal booking — the gift card just changes how the tour got paid for, not whether you need protection around the edges. Set it up so you can keep a card on file without chargeback headaches, and a gift-card guest becomes no riskier than any other.
Here's the one that trips up owners doing their own books. When you sell a gift card, that money is not income yet. Under U.S. accrual accounting rules (ASC 606), cash from a gift-card sale is booked as deferred revenue — a liability — until the card is redeemed or legally expires, according to Hubifi.
Why it matters: a big gift-card sales month feels like a great month, and it's easy to treat it as pure profit. It isn't. It's a promise to deliver tours later, and it sits on your books as something you owe until you run those trips. Miscount it and you can overstate your income right when tax time arrives. If you keep your own books, flag gift-card sales for your bookkeeper so they land in the right column.
Quick flag, then we'll move on. Some states require a separate Seller of Travel registration before a business can legally sell travel. In California, for example, a company may not be able to legally sell a gift card redeemable for its own tour fees unless it holds a Seller of Travel registration — on top of complying with the state's gift-card statute, according to Travefy.
This is easy to miss because it has nothing to do with gift-card law itself; it's a separate compliance layer. Check whether your state has one before you launch a card program.
Within the legal limits, you get to set the rules. Decide these before you sell your first card:
A quick pass before you go live:
Almost every risk on this list comes from the same place: a gift card that lives outside your normal booking flow, redeemed by hand. That's where the balance gets miscollected, the card-on-file gets skipped, and the bookkeeping goes sideways.
The cleaner setup is to sell and redeem through the same system you already use to take bookings — so redemption, remaining-balance collection, and the card on file all happen in one checkout instead of a manual workaround. That's the thinking behind how Junglebee handles card payments, deposits, and a card on file, and it's worth seeing how Junglebee handles bookings, deposits, and card payments before you bolt a gift-card program onto a process that already works. Sell them on purpose, word the terms carefully, and gift cards become one of the few easy wins in a tour operator's year.
