The free and easy way to raise money for travelling

Hello everybody!

As the title suggests, today we’ll be discussing travelling, crowdfunding and especially — the close relationship they share.

After talking with lots of people recently — most of who new to crowdfunding in general — the majority of them were surprised that crowdfunding can be used for covering your travel expenses as well.

Crowdfunding for charity? — “Of course!”

For a business? — “Sure.”

For investing? — “Errr, if you say so.”

For travelling? — “Wait, what? Travelling?! Someone will give me money so that I can travel somewhere?”

Yes, yes, they will. Provided you manage to create a good campaign and promote it well, of course. But if you do, you can easily be successful. People have been doing it for almost as long as crowdfunding itself exists.

Even on platforms such as Kickstarter, where campaigns designed to fund personal expenses are not allowed, people still manage to snug a campaign for travel expenses every once in a while by simply masquerading it as something else. By saying that they want to go to X place to write a book about it, to shoot a short film there or something like that.

Why bother lying however, especially since crowdfunding is supposed to be about trust and honesty? There are plenty of platforms where one can crowdfund for travelling expenses. Besides, as with most other things that you can crowdfund, travelling as well has some platforms designed specifically for it.

• Trevolta — One of the several such platforms we managed to find, Trevolta specializes in crowdfunding campaigns for travelling, however they take a 6% fee.
• FundMyTravel — Pretty similar, with a 5% fee.
• TravelStarter — Travel starter is a bit different from the two platforms mentioned above. Together with campaigns for travel expenses, TravelStarter also accepts campaigns for local businesses that can be of interest to travelers in one way or another. You can be funding for a restaurant and offering cooking for tourists for example. In that aspect TravelStarter is an interesting website to check as a tourist — you might find cool food/accommodation/more somewhere and fund them at the same time. However TravelStarter takes 4% fees for successful campaigns and 9% for unsuccessful but flexible ones (same as IndieGoGo’s previous fee system).
• Additionally, some big general crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe have separate sections designated for travelling campaigns, however those websites too have their sizeable fees, usually ~5%.

And then, there’s CoverrMe.com. This new crowdfunding platform is not designed only for travelling expenses, but for all sorts of personal enterprises — medical bills, travelling, weddings/honeymoons, birthdays, pets, funerals/memorial services, family matters, etc. As such, CoverrMe.com excels at all those areas and offers not only a lean and clear design, no time limitation, and fun and engaging “visual footprint” feature, but it’s also free!

That’s right, unlike every other crowdfunding platform, designed for travelling and unlike 99% of platforms in general, CoverrMe.com has 0% fees and leaves the hard-gathered funds to you.

As for the inevitable question:

“How on Earth will I get people to give me money for traveling?!”

Well, the answer isn’t very different from the answer for every other subject you can make a crowdfunding campaign on. We’ve already put a quick guide about crowdfunding on CoverrMe.com and we’re also offering a detailed and personalized email guidance, but let’s also mention some tips that are typical for travelling campaigns here:

• One of the easiest things you can do to ensure the success of your campaign is to have/create a travelling blog or a vlog. Passionate tourists often keep an online blog/vlog where they post pictures and stories from their travels. If the blog/vlog is well done and well kept, it can usually get 1000+ subscribers. And if you have that many followers then crowdfunding is a piece of cake!
• A subsequent idea that’d work best if you have a blog/vlog but can also work on its own is to offer to promise to write an itinerary on your trip and print a personal copy for your funders (and keep that promise of course!)
• If you’re travelling not only for tourism but with a cause as well (can be a personal one), emphasize on the cause, as it can often draw more funders.
• If the trip you’re crowdfunding is for a honeymoon, it’s a good idea to ask/offer your wedding guests to fund your campaign instead of bringing you presents. This is done not with the idea of your guests funding your entire campaign, but simply to jumpstart it. And since Coverrme.com is free, you won’t feel bad that a significant portion of your guests’ money are going elsewhere.
• Offer rewards for your funders. That’s a typical tip that goes for every other type of crowdfunding and that we’ve mentioned in our guide, but it’s important so it bears repeating. Whether it’ll be the aforementioned itinerary, an album with photos, some small, personal gift from the place you’re going to, etc — gifts are essential for every crowdfunding campaign. While crowdfunding for personal causes is primary based on the funders’ altruism, a small and interesting gift can often be the tipping point between not funding and funding. So spend a day or two and think about a nice gift!

We hope all those tips and everything else we have to offer here, at CoverrMe.com are going to help you realize your dream trip in the most fun and pleasant way possible!

Originally published at coverrme.com.