Today’s holiday trivia: An important British holiday tradition has been the day when a lord’s subjects would come wassailing. Today, we think of wassailing as singing carols and spreading good cheer, particularly when doing so door to door, but this tradition initially was intended to replace begging and offer peasants a specific opportunity to receive food and drink—especially figgy puddings—from the wealthy. The food-gifting aspect continues today, often in unusual forms, such as the London’s Drury Lane Theatre’s tradition since 1795 of proving cake and punch for the resident theater company each January 6.

If you are new to travel writing, there is no doubt one thing that seems the golden goal for marking your successful entry into this work: scoring a spot on a free trip for travel writers.

I’ve seen this as a goal for many folks who joining us for our 5-week annual review and 2018 planning process this winter.

And if this is one of your goals this year, I’ve got great news for you:

Setting up free trips as a travel writer is dead simple.

That’s actually why we don’t write about it so much on our blog! Earning money from these trips is much harder–but don’t worry, we discuss that in-depth too throughout these webinars.

The fact of the matter is that most experienced travel writers either:

  • don’t take a lot of press trips or accept sponsored travel for ethical, legal (for certain publications its a contract violation), or simple logistical reasons (many just don’t have the time to devote that the organized press trips require because they’re too busy writing!)
  • prefer to work directly with tourism boards and venues to engage only in highly-individualized itineraries to ensure their travel time is used to the most advantage . . . leaving spots in regular, organized trips for you

Though the winter and early spring months don’t seem like the best time to travel, this is actually when you’ll find yourself with the most opportunities to snag and attend trips because:

  • destinations don’t have tons of visitors at this time, so it’s easier for venues to host you, because they aren’t taking away from paid bookings
  • in order for stories to hit in time for paying leisure travelers to plan their trips, you need to visit, write up, and publish your stories four to six months in advance of the main vacation season
  • the early months of the year are prime time for expos–from regional events like The New York Times Travel Show and the Seattle Golf and Travel Show to major international events like ITB Berlin–which are some of the easiest and best places to set up free trips for yourself (I’ve long planned my entire year just from the connections at ITB each spring)
  • press trips are readily available for all attendees (or, if not all, then those who ace an easy application process) through the many travel writing conferences that take place in the spring

That’s why, for today’s holiday special offer, we’re giving you a chance to grab all of our seven of the webinars from our two series on how to get on press trips and make the most of them for a special price–$37.

You’ll save more than 70 percent on our full webinar packages, which include:

  • streamable high-def video
  • smaller downloadable video
  • streamable and downloadable audio file
  • full transcript available to read on screen or as PDF download
  • all webinar slides in PDF form
  • any applicable worksheets

So today, for just $37, we’re offering the full webinar packages of:

  1. Setting Up Sponsored Trips 101: Getting on a sponsored trip is the holy grail of travel writing, right? Living a life in which you effortlessly hop from one free trip to another, spending your days enjoying haute cuisine and your nights in the fluffy king bed of your complimentary suite? Here we discuss the basic tenets of free travel as a travel writer, from ethics to minimum barrier of entry to the different types of trips, and their various pros and cons.
  2. *NEWLY ADDED* What to Expect on Press Trips: The first in our new series of webinars looking at the pre-, during, and post- aspects of press trips so you can get the most of any sponsored travel you have coming up this summer or are planning down the line, this webinar begins with the full gamut of with what you can realistically expect from your press trips–the good and the bad.
  3. *NEWLY ADDED* How to Prepare for Your Press Trips: In this webinar, we look more about the story side of pre-trip preparation, including how to break your trip into stories, what is safe to pitch based on a limited itinerary or destination you’re not familiar with, and how to handle the catch-22 of pitching when you haven’t yet been accepted on a trip.
  4. *NEWLY ADDED* How to Get the Most (On the Ground) Out of Your Press Trips: In the previous webinar in this series, we looked at the planning aspect of this process–figuring out what stories you can possibly get from the destination and itinerary site unseen–but this time we focus on how to do it in the ground, where the best, most specific story ideas are found.
  5. How To Set Up An Individual Trip From Scratch: In this section we’re going to dive head first into how exactly to plan your own individual sponsored trips that fits your interests, travel preferences, and schedule. Here we look at where to find these trips and best practices for applying. I pull real press trips, read between the lines, and break down exactly what you would do in each situation of your application.
  6. Getting A Spot On A Group Fam Or Press Trip: In this webinar on Getting a Spot on a Group Fam of Press Trip, in our series on getting free travel as a travel writer, we’ll look at where to find these trips and best practices for applying, and then I’ll pull real press trips, read between the lines, and break down exactly what you would do in each situation in your application.
  7. Putting Together A Pitch Portfolio To Support A Big Trip: Here we walk through several press trip itineraries to show who and what to pitch to set up a varied portfolio of coverage for each trip. We discuss five techniques you can use to ensure an impressive pitch portfolio to accompany any press trip request, and how to handle this process whether you’ve never been published and have no connections or have editors that you work with already but perhaps want to branch out to a new subject or geographic area.

To take advantage of this offer and grab these seven webinars just $37–70 percent off the normal pricing–head to the webinar library, and load up your cart with the webinars listed above and enter the code freetravel7.

Delivery: In the webinar library, add all of the webinars listed above to your cart and enter the code freetravel7.

You need to have all seven webinars in your cart for the coupon code to take effect. If you have previously purchased one of the webinars in the set, that will preclude you from adding that specific webinar to your cart.

We set up new test accounts attached to different email addresses to get around this issue, and recommend you do the same if you are running into this issue as it is the only work around.

The webinars will be available immediately in your user profile on webinars.dreamoftravelwriting.com, and you will also receive an email for each webinar with the links to the downloadable audio, video, and transcript files.

We’ve completely removed the expiration time from this coupon so there is no potential of weird time zone interaction affecting the expiration time as with the 11 webinar offer earlier this week, and we’ll shut it off manually when the deal has ended.

If you have any issues with the coupon saying it has expired within the window specified, email us. The shopping cart will automatically alert you if it cannot apply the coupon, because the wrong webinars are in the cart.

This offer has ended. Thank you!

Please check the 12 Days of Christmas page for the new daily offer, or add your email address below to get the day’s offer in your inbox each day when it opens.