Have you ever heard of Groupon? If you haven't it is essentially a site that offers a deal a day provided a certain number of people sign up for it. The deals are usually pretty amazing and are almost always fully subscribed. For the businesses involved it is all about lead generation, creating return customers and part of their marketing plan and not their sales plan. The last point is important because the deals on offer are usually at BELOW COST for the seller. They make a loss on each sale.
Of course at the Travel for Free blog we are not that interested in great deals. We want our stuff FREE. And Groupon is not specifically travel related although it has been used by the likes of urbanadventures.com in some locations.
So what has this all got to do with free travel? A new kid on the tech start up block is a crew called Tripalertz. Their concept is the same as Groupon but they are totally focused on travel. Great deals at around or below cost but still not free. Except the whole business model for these "buy in bulk and save" web businesses is that the deals are crowd sourced and in order to work they require - well a crowd. Tripalertz have managed to pick up some high quality media exposure already and so the crowd is starting to form but to reach the tipping point they need to engage social media and recruit recruiters. This is where the FREE bit for you comes in.
For every person you convince to sign up to Tripalertz you receive $1 in credit to spend on their deals (which as mentioned are cheap!). The difference between this method of crowd sourcing for free travel and that in the original post of this blog is that here you need about 1000 friends to sign up so you can travel for free whereas by following the method in the original post you only need to convince 7, 8 or 9 friends. The possible advantage for the Tripalertz method is you don't have to do a group trip and if you like you can travel alone if you prefer.
To find out more go to Tripalertz by clicking here.
No comments:
Post a Comment