GSTP Premium: Sign Up Now For Exciting New Perks, Same Free Content

Premium…. really GSTP? Yeah, that’s right. And if you wanna skip the spiel, you can just go sign up here. Otherwise, keep reading.

When I was first pitched the idea of GSTP premium about 2/3 years ago, I hated it. Someone suggested holding back some great content behind a firewall, like all the other annoying news sites you see today. I too, get absolutely frustrated when I click a link and it says “sorry, to access this, you’ll need to pay”. It’s not for me, or GSTP.

Plus, let’s be realistic – most content will be available somewhere else, soon enough. I’m not going to even start with the “it saves you money” sales pitch, because in reality GSTP probably fueled a few extra holidays over the years, so reading probably already costs you money, but does add tremendous fun to life.

So began a 2/3 year journey of thinking how premium could actually be “premium”, not just charging people for what was once “free”. As someone who comments daily on airline and hotel programs professionally and from the sidelines, avoiding a GSTP “devaluation’ was important to me.

To create a premium that is a value addition, rather than just some BS money grab, I’ve come up with two tiers, each of which offer what I’d consider to be significant extra value and access, while actually improving the physical GSTP reading experience.

Because we want to deliver something great, we’re limiting access to both. In fact, most spaces have already gone to our mailing list subscribers, but there’s a few left, and we’re closing out signups Friday, or sellout, whichever comes first There’s only 2 suites spots left, so that will likely be gone today. Here’s the story.

GSTP “Royal Suite” and GSTP “Premium”

There’s going to be an annual ‘Premium’ $25 subscription option and a $1200 annual ‘Royal Suite’ subscription option, hereby known as GSTP Premium and GSTP Royal Suite, respectively. The $25 annual plan works out to $2.08 monthly, less than any cup of coffee you’ll buy. The $1200 plan works out to $100 a month.

Angry musicians love to attack how people have no problem buying coffee but don’t buy albums, but their albums are $9.99 and that’s more than a cup of coffee. GSTP’s is less than one cup of coffee per month, but also equally hypocritical, because it too costs more than $2. Moving on…

Premium And Royal Benefits

The first nice nugget of information is that both unlock ‘ad free’ GSTP. That’s right, you’ll no longer have annoying pop ups, or in content ads in any GSTP content, for as long as you’re a subscriber. Just one super clean, nice reading experience. Once you login once, it should stay that way for you, and you can login to multiple devices.

This isn’t the primary reason for signing up, though of course you just want to anyway because you love supporting individual small businesses who call it how it is, like GSTP.

If you want to skip the spiel, you can sign up here and save us both some time.

The second nugget is that you’ll gain access to a library of knowledge, real help from real people, access to private discussions with some of the best minds in travel, and privately curated trip and booking help, depending on the tier. I’ll break it down.

GSTP Premium

This is going to be limited to 500 people, for reasons we can say, and others we cannot. What’s guaranteed is that you’ll have…

• an ad free GSTP experience, where it’s just you, the words, videos and pictures.
• access to private once-monthly travel seminars, with 1 hour long presentations where you can do a deep dive into award chart sweet spots, maximizing flight deals and really go for ultimate knowledge. If travel resumes, we’ll do some in person. You’ll be able to throw out seminar topics you’d like, like using a certain type of points, etc. 
• access to a monthly “ask me anything” group chat Q&A and live video for Premium members only, where we’ll go through pretty much all the questions asked each month.
• members only ‘award alerts’ highlighting great availability using points, before it’s put on the blog, or appears on other blogs! We’ll do these from Europe and USA.

GSTP Royal Suite

Everyone’s a VIP these days, but in hotel and airline computers, it’s the VVIP’s which make agents pause, look up and notice! That’s why there’s only 20 slots available, and with 15 people who’ve quietly taken advantage of this for years, that realistically will mean room for around 5 newcomers. We’re offering this first come first serve. 

As a GSTP ‘Royal Suite’ member (say that five times fast), you’ll not only have all the stuff from Premium, but also direct personal access to GSTP for personal travel consults, booking advice and even advanced notice on some things we can’t blog, or really talk about. If you run a business, I’m happy to help strategize about maximizing rewards in that capacity too.

Included with GSTP ‘Royal Suite’ you’ll enjoy…

• ad-free GSTP reading.
• access to all Premium features, including monthly lectures and group Q&A.
• PLUS
• 1 hour private online travel/spending/finance consultation with Gilbert Ott.
• Personal access to Gilbert via email + WhatsApp, with guaranteed responses in 24 hours time, or less. Whatsapp will be nearly real time responses.
• Booking concierge, with efforts to help find savings on each booking, or searches for award availability. Cash or points, we’ll try to help save you money, or points.
• This includes access to a VIP travel advisor with Virtuoso, Hyatt Prive, and other perks.
• Personalized award availability alerts, for bucket list trips and ideas. You tell us where, when, we’ll help search. 
• Private airline and hotel offers, and heads up on sales before they launch.
• ‘Royal Suite’ first monthly streams with leaders in travel, sports, media, film and music.
• Bespoke loyalty opportunities, which can’t really be discussed publicly.

Hopefully, as you can see, we’re trying to build something fun and “more” here. Not less. GSTP content will remain free, but sometimes a few hours here or there can make all the difference with amazing fare sales, great opportunities and so forth. Processing the info on a one to one level can also be life changing.

It’s totally realistic that many won’t be thinking about travel until late Spring at the earliest, but there are fantastic opportunities already to plan travel for late 2021, and into 2022, while few people are looking and hotels/airlines are desperate. If this is for you, thanks in advance. If it’s not, that’s cool too. Stay safe, be happy!