How we check a chain promo before it goes on the map

Bank dining promos come with a paper trail: each bank publishes its own list, and we read those lists every night. Chain promos are messier. Before one goes on our map, it has to pass four rules.

A chain promo can turn up as a post on a brand’s page, a poster at the counter, a press release, or a screenshot doing the rounds in a group chat. Some of those are the real thing. Some are last month’s offer, or one branch’s offer, or a regular price with a party hat on. The rules below are how we tell them apart.

They exist for one reason. A wrong pin costs someone a trip, a wait and an awkward conversation at the counter. We would rather show you 30 promos we are sure of than 42 that include promos that had already ended or were never promos, and as you will see further down, that is not a figure of speech.

Rule one: official source only

A chain promo goes on the map only if the brand itself announced it: on its own website, its own app, its official social account, or in a press release. That is where the terms live, and where they get corrected when something changes.

Everything else is a lead, not a source. Deal round-ups, aggregator sites and screenshots are often right, and sometimes they show a promo from last year, from another country, or from a single branch. If the only trace of a promo is a repost, it stays off the map until the brand says it out loud.

Rule two: limited-time, not a standing price

A promo has a window. It starts, it ends, and the price is better inside the window than outside it. A value meal sold at the same price all year is a menu price, however loudly it is advertised, and it does not get a pin. The same goes for loyalty perks such as points and member rewards: useful, but they are not an offer anyone can walk in and use.

Rule three: redeemable at the branch

Our map is a map of places you can go to. So a chain promo has to work at the branch itself: dine-in, take-out or pick-up. An offer that only exists inside a delivery app, or only on delivery orders, is left out. It may well be a good deal, but there is no point pinning it to a door where you cannot use it.

Rule four: current, or dated

A promo goes up if it is running now, or if the brand has announced it with a start date. In that second case the listing says when it starts, so nobody turns up a week early. And a promo that has ended comes off, even if the poster is still taped to the counter.

What gets left out, and why

Most of what we leave out fails one rule clearly. The usual suspects:

• A standing menu price dressed up as a promo. It may be a fine price. It is just not a promo (rule two).
• An offer that lives only in a delivery app. Nothing to use at the branch (rule three).
• A promo for a single branch that is not on our map. There is nowhere to put the pin.
• A bundle that saves almost nothing. If the “deal” is barely cheaper than ordering the same things separately, a pin would oversell it.
• A promo whose only source is an aggregator or a screenshot going around. Not official, so not yet (rule one).

Leaving something out is not a verdict on the restaurant. It only means the offer did not meet the bar for a pin, and we would rather miss a good deal than send you to a wrong one.

Checked twice

Every chain promo is checked in two separate passes. The first pass does the research: it finds the brand’s announcement, reads the terms and writes the row, with the promo, its dates, where it works and a link to the source. The second pass does not trust the first. It goes back to the source and re-derives each row on its own: the same promo, the same dates, the same conditions, the same link.

If the two passes agree, the row ships. If they disagree, or the second pass cannot find what the first one saw, the row stays out until it can be confirmed. It is slower than copying someone else’s list, and that is the point.

A worked example: the October 2026 refresh

At the end of September, ahead of October, the whole chain promo list was checked again, row by row, against the brands’ own posts. Here is what happened, in numbers only. We leave the brands unnamed on purpose: this piece is about the method, not the menu.

The list went from 42 rows to 30. Seventeen rows were removed because the promos had ended. Four more were removed because, on a second look, they were standing menu prices rather than promos. Nine new promos were added, and 2 rows that stayed were updated with fresh details from their sources. Forty-two, minus seventeen, minus four, plus nine: thirty.

Those 30 rows are the 30 chain promos in our numbers for 1 October 2026. On their own, they account for 736 places on the map that have a chain promo and no card deal, because a chain’s promo is pinned at its branches.

Card deal pin, chain promo pin

On the map, both kinds of deal are pins, and both link to where they came from. They are still different things. A card deal is a bank’s offer: it comes from the bank’s own promo page, it asks for that bank’s card, and we re-read it every night. A chain promo is a brand’s offer: it comes from the brand’s own post, its terms are whatever the brand sets, and it has passed the four rules above before it gets a pin.

Knowing which is which tells you who has the last word. For a card deal, it is the bank’s page. For a chain promo, it is the brand’s. Either way, it never hurts to confirm with the restaurant before you order.

Where these rules come from

We are Jetzets, and we built tara, a map of credit card dining deals and chain promos. These four rules are the ones a chain promo passes before tara shows it, next to the bank promos tara reads every night. How we check deals covers the bank side, the matching and the limits.