Data & source

Source feed

The data comes from the official U.S. Department of State advisories feed:

https://travel.state.gov/_res/rss/TAsTWs.xml

It’s a standard RSS feed with one <item> per country advisory. Each item carries the threat level and a country code as <category> tags:

<category domain="Threat-Level">Level 3: Reconsider Travel</category>
<category domain="Country-Tag">NI</category>

The advisories endpoint

That feed sends no CORS headers, so a browser can’t read it directly. A small serverless proxy (a Netlify function) fetches it server-side, parses every item, and returns clean JSON with permissive CORS. It’s edge-cached for about an hour. Its canonical home is the dedicated subdomain:

GET https://advisories.visamundi.app/api/advisories

See Installation for a drop-in snippet that consumes it.

{
  "source": "https://travel.state.gov/_res/rss/TAsTWs.xml",
  "updated": "2026-06-22T08:00:00.000Z",
  "count": 214,
  "advisories": [
    {
      "country": "Nigeria",
      "fips": "NI",
      "iso2": "NG",
      "level": 3,
      "levelLabel": "Reconsider Travel",
      "date": "Fri, 12 Jun 2026",
      "link": "https://travel.state.gov/.../nigeria-travel-advisory.html",
      "summary": "Reconsider travel to Nigeria due to crime, terrorism, unrest, kidnapping, and inconsistent availability of health care services."
    }
  ]
}

The widget renders and filters this list entirely in the browser, so it’s always current — no rebuild needed.

Why the flags need a code mapping

The feed’s Country-Tag is a State-Department code, not ISO 3166 — Lesotho is LT (ISO LS), Turkey is TU (ISO TR), Botswana is BC (ISO BW). Flag images are keyed by ISO code, so the proxy maps each Country-Tag to its ISO country code (the iso2 field above) before the widget requests the rounded flag. A couple of entries (e.g. “French West Indies”) have no single-country flag and render without one.