Discount codes: Best practices

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Discount codes can support a wide range of promotional and booking scenarios, but thoughtful configuration is important to help prevent unexpected redemption behavior, reporting confusion, or pricing conflicts.

Use the recommendations below to improve consistency, reduce friction during checkout, and better align discount behavior with your promotional goals.

Best practices

Structure discounts around specific booking goals

Configure discount eligibility as narrowly as possible to help prevent unintended discount application.

Examples include:

  • Restricting discounts to specific items rather than all bookings
  • Applying discounts only to selected customer types
  • Limiting redemption periods for time-sensitive promotions
  • Setting minimum booking amounts for higher-value discounts

This approach can help improve reporting clarity and reduce accidental over-discounting.

Use customer-type restrictions intentionally

Customer-type restrictions are best used when promotions should apply only to selected participant categories, such as adult tickets or child tickets.

When configuring customer-type restrictions:

  • Confirm that all intended ticket types are eligible
  • Verify that non-eligible customer types behave as expected during checkout
  • Review online booking flows to ensure discount presentation is clear to customers

Plan redemption limits carefully

Maximum usage limits apply to individual qualifying item redemptions, not just completed bookings or transactions.

When using online cart, multiple eligible items within the same booking can count toward the maximum redemption limit.

Before launching high-volume promotions:

  • Estimate expected redemption activity
  • Consider whether item-level redemption counting may affect availability
  • Review usage reporting regularly during active promotions

Use activity date restrictions to support seasonal promotions

Activity date restrictions can help align promotions with operational availability, blackout periods, or seasonal inventory planning.

Consider using:

  • Valid activity dates for limited-time seasonal promotions
  • Blackout dates for holidays or high-demand periods
  • Day-of-week restrictions for weekday-only offers

Blackout dates always override valid activity date settings.

Review feature interactions before launching promotions

Some booking features may affect discount code behavior or redemption eligibility.

Before launching promotions, review how discount codes interact with:

For more information, see Guidelines for using discount codes with other features.

Common pitfalls & things to avoid

Expecting discount codes to stack

Only one discount code can currently be redeemed per booking or transaction.

Although a single discount code may apply to multiple qualifying items within the same booking, multiple discount codes cannot be combined together.

Using discount codes for advanced campaign behavior

Discount codes are best suited for straightforward promotional setups.

More advanced use cases, such as randomized code generation or more complex promotional logic, may be better suited for campaigns.

To compare discount and campaign use cases, see Redemption types: Summary & use cases.

Overlooking combo-related redemption behavior

Discount codes have limited compatibility with combos and packaged combos.

Unless configured with a 0 value discount amount:

  • Discount codes cannot be redeemed when all combo items are already present in the cart
  • Existing discount codes may be removed automatically once combo pricing becomes applicable
  • Combo pricing takes precedence over standard discount code pricing

Review combo-related booking flows carefully before launching promotions that involve bundled pricing.

Related workflows