How tara finds and checks deals

Every deal on tara comes from somewhere you can check: a bank’s own promo page, or a brand’s own announcement. This is how tara reads them, what it does before a deal reaches the map, how deals leave it, and where it can still be wrong.

We wrote this because the Journal now names banks, restaurants, offers and end dates, and you should know where those come from before you plan a dinner around one. Everything below describes how tara works on 15 October 2026.

Nine banks, read every night

tara reads the public promo pages of nine banks: BDO, BPI, Chinabank, EastWest, Maybank, Metrobank, RCBC, Security Bank and UnionBank. The read runs every night at 3:23 in the morning, Manila time, with a second slot at 4:41 that only runs if the first did not finish. A deal you see in the morning was on the bank’s page a few hours earlier.

Banks publish in different ways. Some put each promo on its own page; some keep one long list; some load their promos into the page as data, which tara reads the same way your browser does. For RCBC, EastWest, Metrobank and BPI, tara also opens each promo’s own page for the details a listing leaves out: the dates, the terms, the eligible cards and the participating branches.

Not every promo is about food. Where a bank labels its promos, such as BDO’s “Dine” or Metrobank’s “Dining”, tara uses the bank’s own label; otherwise it looks for words that mark a dining promo, and for BPI the place the promo names decides. A bank can be read every night and still have no dining promo on the map: on 15 October 2026, Maybank had none.

From a bank’s page to a pin

For each promo, tara keeps the bank’s title, the offer, the dates, the eligible cards, a copy of the terms and a link back to the bank’s page. It turns the offer into a short sticker, such as -50%, FREE or B1T1, and reads the days the promo runs.

Days are read carefully, because they are where most wrong trips start. A promo can list its days (Mondays to Thursdays), say it runs every day, or say nothing. tara keeps those three apart. When the wording is unclear, tara does not guess: the promo goes on the map with no days shown and goes on a list for a person to read, and the corrections people make are applied every night after that.

Matching branches to the map

tara’s map of places comes from OpenStreetMap, plus places the team adds by hand with an address, plus the tenant directories that mall operators publish themselves. A promo is matched to those places by name: exact names first, then spellings that differ only a little, with a strict bar for how close they must be. A single restaurant needs a closer match than a chain, because a chain’s other branches back the match up.

The match is then narrowed by what the promo itself says: the city or district, the hotel a restaurant is in, or the branches and malls the bank lists as participating. When tara cannot find a match it trusts, the promo is not pinned. tara’s rule, written into the matcher, is that no pin beats a wrong pin. One exception: when the bank lists participating branches, a listed branch tara has no address for, and so cannot rule out, stays on. Unmatched promos wait on a review list. Two correction files fix what the matcher gets wrong: one moves or removes pins, each with a written reason, and one removes venues that have closed, each with a source link.

Chain promos

Chain promos are not from banks, so nobody publishes them in one list. The tara team researches them and checks each one again in a second pass, and a promo goes on the map only from the brand’s own website, its app, its official social post or a press release; deal roundups and aggregator sites are leads, never the source. Each chain promo links to the source it was checked against; on 15 October 2026 every one of them linked to the brand’s own website or official social account. How we check a chain promo before it goes on the map has the four rules and how each row is checked twice.

When a brand gives no end date, tara shows none rather than inventing one. Chain promos with an end date leave the map the same way bank promos do, as soon as their last day has passed; an undated one stays until we take it off at a refresh.

How deals leave the map

A promo leaves tara when its last day has passed. That happens three times over: the night’s read skips promos whose end date is behind it, the build that makes the map’s data drops them again, and the app itself hides any deal whose end date is before today in Manila, so a promo that ended yesterday is gone the next time the app loads its data after midnight, even before the next read.

Some banks mark a promo “Expired on” while leaving it on their page. tara treats that as ended and holds the promo back for a person to look at. When BPI, EastWest, RCBC or Maybank state no end date in their listing, tara gives the promo a provisional end 45 days ahead so it cannot linger forever, and for BPI, EastWest and RCBC replaces it with the bank’s own date when the promo’s own page states one. An undated promo from the other banks shows no end date. In the Journal’s lists, both are shown as “no end date given”, which is what the bank says.

Guards against a bad night

Bank sites change their layout, go down or time out. If tara cannot read a bank on a given night, yesterday’s promos from that bank stay. If a bank’s fresh list shrinks to less than 60% of the night before, tara assumes something went wrong with the read and keeps the old list. And if the whole set of deals about to go live is less than 75% of what is live now, or any bank with ten or more deals loses more than half of them, the night’s update stops altogether and the map keeps yesterday’s data. The next night’s read tries again, and a person decides whether a drop that size is real.

When you find a mistake

Every deal in tara has a report button. You pick what is wrong, such as not honoured at this branch, wrong days, already ended or not started, a pin in the wrong place, or a venue that has closed or moved, and add a note if you like. There is also a feedback form for bugs, missing or wrong deals and suggestions. Reports need a signed-in account and go straight to the tara team’s inbox. You can also write to hello@jetzetsph.com. How you can help shape tara shows four reports and what they fixed.

Where tara can still be wrong

We would rather say this plainly than have you find out at the counter.

• The terms on tara are a copy, and a short one. tara keeps an excerpt of each bank’s terms: at most 400 characters, cut at the last full sentence inside them. The full terms are one tap away on the bank’s page, and they are what the restaurant goes by.
• Days can be missing. When tara cannot read the days with confidence, it shows none. That is not the same as every day.
• Some end dates are provisional. The app does not yet mark which end dates are tara’s 45-day placeholder rather than the bank’s.
• Pins can be off. A mall tenant is pinned to its mall’s building, not its exact unit, and a matcher that is strict on purpose still makes mistakes, and leaves out promos it cannot place.
• The map is up to a day old. A bank can end or change a promo during the day, and tara will only see it that night.

What this means for the Journal

The Journal’s promo lists are built from the same data, on a stated day. Each list says when its data is from, never lists a promo that ended before the day it was built, and links every promo to the bank’s or the brand’s own page. Where tara’s one-line sticker would mislead, such as a top rate that only some cards get, the list adds a short note from the bank’s terms. Our checklist for reading those terms is in How to read a bank dining promo. None of this replaces the bank’s own page: it decides, so check it before you pay.