FCDO Travel Advice Monitor - Country Guidance Changes

SOURCE COVERAGE & PRACTICAL LIMITS

Full product guide

Documentation captured from build 1.0.4. Example outputs retain their original sample context; they are not live results.

Country guidance, with source context

Maintain a sourced travel-guidance watchlist for research or operational briefings. Each saved row contains one destination, exact FCDO warning codes and selected official guidance sections.

Open this Actor in Console · First run · Results · Cost · Full guide

Try this Actor

1. Choose a small scope. Use the existing France Entry Requirements and Travel Warnings example below: one destination, two named sections and at most one saved row.
2. Run and review. Open the dataset and check requested-section coverage. Review the run's key-value-store SUMMARY for failed destinations, partial coverage and saved-history status.
3. Use the results. Export JSON to retain section text, hashes and evidence. Follow the official guidance link when preparing a travel briefing.

Read this before using the data: FCDO guidance is directed at UK travellers. A warning about part of a destination is not a countrywide warning, and an empty warning-code array does not mean safe travel. Observation time is not the publisher's update time.

France Entry Requirements and Travel Warnings — copy this input into the JSON editor in Console.

{
  "countries": [
    "france"
  ],
  "sections": [
    "entry-requirements",
    "warnings-and-insurance"
  ],
  "maxResults": 1
}

Result preview

The dataset view highlights these columns:

• Advice ID · adviceId
• Destination · country
• Destination slug · countrySlug
• Guidance title · title
• Published warning codes · alertStatuses
• Publisher material update · publicUpdatedAt

Use the original source links and the field definitions below when interpreting the results. CSV works well for flat columns; JSON preserves nested values.

Usage and pricing

Base result rate on the FREE tier: $2 per 1,000 country advice observations. The Pricing tab shows your plan's result rate and any Actor Start charge. Set a small result limit for the first run; the requested limit is not a guarantee of that many results.

Full guide

Build a country watchlist from the official GOV.UK Content API. Each row contains one destination, the exact FCDO warning codes and selected guidance sections. Use the source links and section hashes to review changed entry requirements, travel disruption notices or regional warnings. This is a data monitor, not an assessment of whether a journey is safe.

Quick start

{} and Console prefill request France, Japan and Ukraine. Empty countries and sections also use these documented fallbacks. Destinations are processed in sorted slug order; maxResults limits saved countries, not requested pages. Unknown or failed destinations are listed in SUMMARY. Up to 100 explicitly listed destinations are supported; this Actor does not promise a complete world inventory.

Output and interpretation

FCDO guidance is directed at UK travellers. alertStatuses preserves published codes such as avoid_all_travel_to_parts; a warning about part of a destination is not a countrywide warning. An empty code array does not mean safe travel. publicUpdatedAt is the publisher’s material update time; reviewedAt can differ or be null. changeDescription is the publisher’s note, not an AI summary. Advice may be current even when its last material update is older.

sections includes text, source URL, full-source hash, source character count and a truncation flag. Missing selected sections are reported in missingRequestedSections. sectionHashes and changedSections identify content changes; snapshot comparison also covers exact warning codes and publisher update metadata. Formatting whitespace is normalized before hashing. Keyword matching uses complete selected section text and emits literal evidence, including matches beyond displayed truncation. The optional date filter uses the UTC day of publicUpdatedAt.

Overview fields: adviceId, country, countrySlug, title, alertStatuses, publicUpdatedAt, changeDescription, url, sections, changedSections, comparisonStatus, observedAt. Export JSON for nested evidence and section arrays. Every row has an observation time; it is not a source publication time.

Saved comparisons

Set comparePrevious: true to annotate matching rows as new, changed or unchanged. onlyChanges: true implies comparison and skips unchanged rows. A first run saves matching observations and logs a baseline warning. SUMMARY.historyUpdated confirms the final history write. No-op runs warn and may correctly return zero results.

History scope includes the sorted country list, selected sections, keywords, date filter and snapshotName. maxResults and display text length do not change the scope. Full source hashes detect edits even when returned text is shortened. changedSections is empty on the first observation and lists changed/added/removed selected section slugs on later comparisons.

Only confirmed saved rows advance the named persistent key-value-store history. Failed or charge-rejected writes do not advance it. Prior observations are retained on partial runs. One writer per history scope is required; a final read detects conflicting updates but this is not a transactional lock. Malformed history fails with an actionable error; choose a new snapshotName. History is capped at 20,000 identities. A result cap may leave unseen records for a later comparison run.

Coverage, failures and charging

No API key or login is required. Public-source requests use SSRF/DNS/redirect safeguards, robots checks and bounded compressed-body decoding. A request takes at most 25 seconds and remains within maxRunSeconds (default 240) and the platform deadline minus 25 seconds. Transient failures get at most two retries.

SUMMARY reports source coverage, failures, not-reached sources, saved rows, unchanged skips and time/spend limits. Errors and access challenges never become dataset rows. All-source failures fail the run; a successful source with an empty filter result warns. Source, history or budget failures make coverage incomplete. An intentional result/page limit is a bounded request. Do not interpret a partial or truncated observation as complete coverage.

Planned price: $0.002 per saved record on FREE/BRONZE, $0.0016 SILVER and $0.0012 GOLD/PLATINUM/DIAMOND, plus a $0.00005 Actor Start event. The Store pricing tab is authoritative. Unchanged skipped records and diagnostic errors do not create dataset charges. Normal platform usage may also apply according to the Store plan.

Three exact example inputs

France Entry Requirements and Travel Warnings

Export the official France entry requirements and warnings with source links and section hashes.

Use the copyable first-run input above.

Japan Safety and Regional Travel Guidance

Export Japan safety and regional guidance with exact publisher wording and update metadata.

{
  "countries": [
    "japan"
  ],
  "sections": [
    "safety-and-security",
    "regional-risks"
  ],
  "maxResults": 1
}

Ukraine FCDO Warnings and Regional Guidance

Keep exact FCDO regional warning codes alongside Ukraine warnings and regional guidance.

{
  "countries": [
    "ukraine"
  ],
  "sections": [
    "warnings-and-insurance",
    "regional-risks"
  ],
  "maxResults": 1
}

Sources and reuse

GOV.UK Content API is documented for applications that reuse and keep government content current. This Actor reads only country advice JSON under /api/content/foreign-travel-advice/. GOV.UK reuse guidance and the Open Government Licence v3.0 apply. Output carries attribution. Maps, logos and third-party files are not downloaded.

Development

Node 20+, exact apify 3.7.2 and cheerio 1.1.2; basic-ftp 6.2.2 override. Run npm ci --ignore-scripts then npm test. Use an isolated CRAWLEE_STORAGE_DIR for local runs. Local and cloud bounded checks establish sample behavior, not exhaustive coverage or customer demand.

Help with your run

Open the Issues tab on this Actor with the run URL, the input field that caused trouble and what you expected to receive. Remove API keys and private information before posting.

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Understand your run

Open Run report in the run’s Output tab for saved-record counts, reported source issues and limits, and suggested next steps. Use CSV export to take the saved results into a spreadsheet. The existing JSON results and detailed machine-readable summary remain available.

The report reflects this run’s recorded coverage. A successful run or a saved result does not establish that every possible source record was collected.