How to Sell Travel Vouchers, Gift Cards and Airline Credits

Travel vouchers come in many shapes; transferability varies sharply by type. Quick taxonomy of what works on a P2P marketplace and what doesn't.

Hotels.com gift cards: typically sold as transferable products, redeemable by code at checkout, not tied to the original buyer's account. Top resale category — buyers want them and supply is steady. Hotels.com publishes T&C confirming gift cards are transferable but non-refundable.

Expedia gift cards / Global Hotel Card: same model, transferable by code. Expedia gift cards apply to hotel bookings, not flights — verify on the Expedia gift card help page (their official article 'Can I book flights using Expedia gift cards?' answers this directly). Sold on Target, Newegg, Hotelgift, and the secondary market.

Booking.com gift cards / credits: gift cards are transferable; account-bound 'credits' from refunds are not. The difference is the redemption mechanism — gift cards have a code, credits sit in your account. Sell only the gift cards.

Vrbo gift certificates: transferable in the same way as Expedia (same parent company). Lower-volume secondary market than Hotels.com, but a real one.

Airline COVID vouchers / future travel credits: case by case. Most are tied to the original ticketed name and not transferable. Read the issuance email — it usually says 'valid for travel by [name]' or 'valid for any traveller booked by the original recipient'. The latter is sometimes resellable via companion-booking workarounds; the former is not.

Airline gift cards / e-vouchers (Delta, Southwest, JetBlue): transferable codes, popular with frequent flyers on those airlines. Southwest gift cards in particular have huge US search volume and a real secondary market.

Airline miles and points: do not list. Selling miles violates virtually every loyalty programme's T&Cs (Avios, SkyMiles, Miles & More, AAdvantage, MileagePlus) and can cost you the account. SpareHolidays does not facilitate miles transfers.

OTA account credits (Airbnb credits, Booking.com Genius credits): tied to the account, not the booking. Not transferable. Do not list.

There are four real venues for selling unused travel vouchers in 2026, plus one option people forget. Honest pros and cons of each — written by the marketplace, not by an affiliate-paid round-up.

SpareHolidays: travel-specific marketplace with Stripe escrow, ID verification for all users, 7-day buyer protection window, 10% buyer commission (free to list). Pro: built for travel resale, escrow protects both sides. Con: smaller audience than the big general gift-card sites — you're trading wider reach for travel-specific buyers and stronger trust mechanics.

Raise (US): general gift-card resale marketplace. Sells everything from Starbucks to Hotels.com. Pro: massive audience. Con: payouts capped lower than face value (typically you receive 70-85% of card value), no travel-specific dispute resolution, no escrow on the seller's payout side.

CardCash: instant-buy gift card site — they buy your card immediately at a discount and resell themselves. Pro: instant cash, no waiting for a buyer. Con: payout is the worst of the four (typically 60-75% of face value) because they're absorbing all the resale risk.

Reddit / Facebook private trades (r/giftcardexchange, etc): zero fees on a successful trade. Pro: best payout if it works. Con: no escrow, no protection, scam volume is real, you eat the loss when it goes wrong. Works best for low-value cards where the loss tolerance is built in.

The forgotten option: stack and use yourself. Hotels.com cards can sometimes be combined; Expedia codes can stack with bookings; Booking.com credits sit in your account waiting for the right trip. Before listing on any marketplace, check if you can apply the credit to a booking you'd actually make in the next 6 months. Most people throw vouchers away because they assume they're worth less than the effort — they're often worth using directly.

Travel vouchers typically sell at 60-85% of face value across the major venues. A $200 Hotels.com card sells for $130-$170 on a P2P marketplace. Three things drive the price: the issuing brand (Hotels.com and Expedia move faster than niche brands), the time to expiry (more urgent = bigger discount), and the face value (low-value cards under €50 sell harder because the absolute saving doesn't justify the buyer's hassle).

Vouchers for popular brands move fastest. Hotels.com, Expedia, Booking.com, Southwest, Delta — all liquid. Vouchers for airlines that have ceased operations or restricted routes (formerly Wow Air, Norwegian's transatlantic service, etc.) are dead — don't list them.

Short expiry hurts. A voucher with 30 days left sells for materially less than the same voucher with 12 months. If your voucher expires in under 6 months, price aggressively (60-70% of face value) to move it before time runs out. Vouchers that expire while listed get auto-deactivated — listing-time runway matters.

Honest baseline: SpareHolidays is early, eleven verified accounts as of this week. The exact spreads above are observed across the wider voucher resale market; our own listed range will tighten as supply grows. You're trading reach for trust mechanics — escrow, dispute resolution, buyer protection.

Setup takes under 5 minutes. Select 'Voucher' as the listing category. Enter: issuing brand (Hotels.com, Expedia, Southwest, etc.), face value, currency, expiry date, and any restrictions ('valid on hotels only, not flights' for Expedia gift cards, 'valid on Ryanair routes' for airline-branded vouchers).

Buyers will ask for proof the voucher is real. Prepare a screenshot showing the voucher in your account or the issuance email — redact the actual code with a black box, you're proving authenticity not handing over redemption power. The actual code goes through SpareHolidays' messaging only after funds clear into escrow.

Voucher transfer happens by sharing the code (for code-based vouchers) or by walking the buyer through redemption if there's any platform-specific quirk (the Hotels.com 'merge balances' flow, for instance, has a per-card limit and a one-merge-per-card rule that's worth flagging to a buyer who's stacking multiple cards).

Never share account passwords. If a voucher is account-bound and can only be redeemed by the account holder, it's not transferable — don't list it. Code-redeemable vouchers transfer cleanly; account-bound credits do not.

Voucher sales carry the highest fraud risk in P2P resale because vouchers can be tested instantly and the seller could in theory redeem the code themselves before the buyer notices. SpareHolidays' escrow + 7-day protection window is built for this specific problem.

The flow: buyer pays into Stripe escrow, seller shares the voucher code via SpareHolidays messaging, buyer has 7 days to verify the code is valid and the listed face value is correct. Buyer confirms → funds release within 24 hours. Buyer disputes (code invalid, expired, wrong balance) → dispute team reviews messaging history and the screenshot evidence, refunds the buyer if the listing was misrepresented.

Buyer practical advice: don't just check the balance — actually apply the voucher to a real booking search. A code can show a balance and still fail at checkout for restrictions you didn't notice. Test against a booking you'd realistically make.

Seller practical advice: never share a voucher code via email, SMS, or any channel outside SpareHolidays messaging. The escrow protection only applies if the transaction history is on-platform. Off-platform code sharing means no escrow, no dispute, no recourse.