Why Membership?

Thank you for your interest in becoming a Travel Insider Supporting Member.  As you probably already know, the vast majority of the millions of words of content on our website, blog and in our newsletters are all entirely free for everyone.

Since its founding in the dark days immediately after 9/11/2001, The Travel Insider has been your constant companion – variously advising, assisting, amusing, and advocating.

We have helped you travel smarter.  We have helped you make the best choices when choosing travel related technology.  We have helped you by advocating tirelessly on your behalf for fairer processes and procedures, for passenger rights, and holding airlines and government organizations to account and offering public ridicule and rebuke when they cross the line of fairness and common sense.

We have helped you work your way through the system, and have helped you with your rights when problems arise.  We’ve not counted, but we estimate somewhere between five and ten million words of content have been written, single-handedly by me, David Rowell, since The Travel Insider was founded.  How much is that?  Comparable to 100 hard-cover books, an average of one full sized book worth of content every couple of months.

So how do we keep the lights on and pay the bills?  You see inoffensive ads on pages (we turn those off for supporters, by the way), but they provide very little income.  We offer occasional tours for our readers, but they are far from numerous enough, nor priced high enough, to be an appreciable earner.  The key part of our income comes from generous readers such as yourself, who choose to become supporters and contribute to our ongoing operation.

The essence of The Travel Insider is open information for all.  But we also wish to recognize, reward, and incentivize people like you, who are considering providing some support.  So we offer additional premium content, some discounts from selected supporting suppliers, and other assorted benefits to our ‘Supporting Members’.  Who was it who said ‘Membership hath its privileges’ (American Express, I think!).

The extra premium content ranges from lengthy detailed special reports to an occasional extra paragraph or section in articles that are largely open to everyone.  The other discounts and benefits are things we feel genuinely are of value, and for sure, if you made use of everything we offer, we hope you’d get many times your kind contribution back again.

Rather than try to force you into a ‘one size fits all’, or, equally bad, into the ‘Army Clothing Sizes’ options of ‘too big’ and ‘too small’, we allow you to choose whatever level and amount of support you wish to kindly give, and whether it be on a single one-off basis, or ongoing (until you easily and simply cancel) every month, quarter, or year.

Let’s now discuss the specifics of our membership options.  Please click on to the next page – about the Membership benefits you’ll receive in return.