If you don’t ask, you don’t get.
Being able to see the world is one of the greatest gifts there is, but not everyone can afford to travel. With flights, accommodations, and visas to arrange, traveling can be expensive, and a lack of money is often quoted as the greatest barrier to taking that trip. Flight deal alert website Going (formerly known as Scott’s Cheap Flights) recently released its annual State of Travel report, which revealed that the number one reason people won’t be traveling in 2023 is due to limited finances. In a study conducted by financial planning site Bankrate last year, 69% of the 2,676 U.S. adults surveyed intended to change their vacation plans due to inflation. But what if you could bolster your bank balance for adventures through the kindness of friends, family, or even strangers? Enter the world of travel crowdfunding.
Crowdfunding is an innovative approach to raising capital whereby you solicit pledges from known and unknown digital donors. Whatever your intended adventure, you can create a campaign to gather the funds you need on general crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe or on travel-specific registry platforms like Celebration Wishes.
All you need is a compelling and captivating description that outlines your reasons for traveling and your aspirations during your journey, and you’ll be on your way to receiving contributions from generous and kind-hearted individuals all over the world.
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INSIDER TIPTraveling is widely viewed as a luxury rather than a necessity, so be prepared that not everyone will be supportive of your decision to pool resources to satisfy your wanderlust.
GoFundMe
A donation is made every second on GoFundMe, a trusted, recognized, and versatile community-led fundraising website with the mission to be “the most helpful place in the world.” Since launching in 2010, it has facilitated over 200 million individual donations for a myriad of personal projects and granted travel wishes ranging from family reunions to helping star-crossed lovers find their happy ending overseas. To get started, fill out all the required form fields, add photos and text, circulate the link to your live campaign, and ask well-wishers and loved ones to contribute to your experience. The site has solid technical support, so your hand is held throughout the process, and backers are protected by the GoFundMe Giving Guarantee for a year after donating.
FundMyTravel
Being strapped for cash won’t get in the way of your next big adventure if you ask friends and family to chip in with the aptly-named FundMyTravel. Developed by the people behind the international study site GoAbroad.com, this platform was created to provide a dedicated space for travel crowdfunding without competing for attention with multiple campaign categories like medical or emergency missions. FundMyTravel keeps five percent of the money your donors pledge, so the rest is yours to make the world your oyster—or whichever cuisine tickles your fancy.
GoGetFunding
Whether your heart is set on a trip to Zambia or you harbor fantasies of crossing the Atlantic to write your heart out at a retreat for authors, you can make the dream a reality with GoGetFunding. Personal campaigns and volunteering are some of this site’s top categories, enabling fundraising with no deadlines in multiple languages and with different currencies. GoGetFunding launched in December 2011 and transitioned from an all-or-nothing approach to a keep-it-all model, so your money won’t be returned to backers in the event that a campaign isn’t successful. On GoGetFunding, anybody anywhere in the world is invited to crowdfund for absolutely anything as long as it is legal.
Honeyfund
Honeyfund doesn’t want a less-than-accommodating bank account to be the reason you don’t go on the honeymoon of your wildest dreams. The idea for this online gift registry came to founder Sara Margulis after she and her then-fiancé managed to crowdfund their honeymoon to Fiji. She went on to appear on Shark Tank in 2014, where she secured funding from investor Kevin O’Leary, a trusted advisor to the company.
Highlighting the importance of travel for couples, Honeyfund conducted a survey of 1,000 married couples in the U.S. and found that 84% of the pairs that rated their relationships as “excellent” also traveled together regularly. Contrastingly, out of the couples that rated their marital satisfaction as “not so good,” 78% did not regularly go on trips together. For this reason, the company seeks to help couples fund all of life’s adventures like anniversary getaways and even down payments for a home. Users can receive cash via their Honeyfund Wallet, PayPal, or bank account, and can also register to receive gift cards from every popular brand under the sun.
INSIDER TIP Crowdfunding platforms recommend that you are genuine and honest about the motivation behind your campaign and share any challenges you may have faced to foster understanding and empathy, and also really drive home the message of how much this cause means to you.
Celebration Wishes
Traveling to celebrate or commemorate a special occasion? Make Celebration Wishes your one-stop shop. The site is brought to you by the team behind Honeymoon Wishes, the 2003-founded honeymoon registry that has partnerships with resorts, cruise lines, and experiences in over 850 global destinations. Founders Kris and Lee decided to branch out in 2010 to help anyone honor their relationships and milestones, and to date, more than 1.2 million travel wishes have been granted. Signing up is easy, and you don’t need to be tech-savvy to do so. Register with Celebration Wishes, and you’ll be on your fantasy birthday, vacay, anniversary, family reunion, graduation trip, bachelorette, or babymoon in no time.
INSIDER TIPLook for easy setup, adequate tools for sharing your campaign, and low fees when choosing a crowdfunding platform. The more commission the site charges, the less money you’ll have for your epic adventure.
Plumfund
Made by the founders of Honeyfund, Plumfund proclaims to be the world’s best free digital “crowd-gifting” platform where you can create campaigns to receive monetary gifts for various purposes, including travel and adventure funds. Plumfund’s website refers to Eugene Fodor’s oft-quoted stance that “you don’t have to be rich to travel well,” and the company doesn’t charge users for listings so they can easily raise funds for their mission trips, birthday extravaganzas, retirement celebrations, destination weddings, and once-in-a-lifetime voyages.
INSIDER TIPBe transparent and don’t abuse the trust of the people that are kind enough to offer donations. If you say the money is for travel, don’t misappropriate the funds for other personal expenses. By doing so, you could cause donors to lose faith in other people’s worthy campaigns down the road.
Traveler’s Joy
Traveler’s Joy is one of the OG wedding registries that has served over 600,000 honeymooners since 2004. The Brooklyn-founded site has in-depth destination guides to provide couples with sparks of inspiration while setting up their registries, which are delightfully uncomplicated. Though twosomes can select experiences on all corners of the globe for their honeymoons, the service is only available to U.S. residents. Well-wishers can gift you five-star hotel stays, send you trekking through the Atlas Mountains with a heartfelt note, or choose to contribute to your registry anonymously if they would like a more extravagant way to announce their gifts.
Hitchd
Hitchd is the registry of choice for aesthetics-focused honeymooners that wish to crowdfund their post-nuptial vacations and provide their donors with a wide variety of payment options, including Venmo, Cash App, Revolut, Zelle, Wise, PayPal, and also Bitcoin. A processing fee is incurred for credit card transactions. With a modern interface and millions of high-definition images, videos, and custom fonts, couples can create highly stylized sites to showcase their honeymoon funds. Available in 29 countries, Hitchd does not take a cut out of any contributions you receive, and donors can give as little as $1 and as much as $10,000.
Zola
Enamored pairs who want a one-stop shop for all of their honeymoon and wedding planning needs should look no further than Zola. Couples can create free wedding websites, find vendors and venues, send out invitations, shop for attire, and raise funds for their perfect honeymoons all in one place on this wedding portal.
Honeymooners can set up cash funds to spend on whatever tickles their fancy or choose experiences and gift cards for the likes of Celebrity Cruises, Royal Caribbean, Delta Airlines, Fairmont Hotels, or an on-location professional photo shoot with Flytographer. More than 500 brands are part of Zola’s partner library, and betrothed twosomes can keep tabs on all their generous donations via Zola’s gift tracker and thank you manager.
Fundly
Fundly lets digital hopefuls create customizable fundraising campaigns for charity and individual pursuits. Though not as popular as some of the other sites on this list, Fundly is a great place to receive money for anything from disaster relief to walks, runs, and trips. It is a user-friendly and flexible site with stellar customer support, and you can begin accepting donations from the moment your campaign is live. Besides a Stripe payment processing fee, Fundly remarkably lets users keep all the money they receive as it has a zero percent platform fee and relies on backers’ donations when they pledge.
INSIDER TIPCreating a crowdfunding campaign on a crowdfunding site does not guarantee you’ll make all the money you need to travel. Don’t rely solely on crowdfunding as a replacement for financial planning and saving. Remember that you’ll need to actively promote your listing by sharing it far and wide and asking your network to share it among theirs.
Crowdfunder
Don’t let limited financial resources stop you from having the trip of a lifetime. Get monetary support for your travels with Crowdfunder, a UK-based organization that serves businesses, community projects, sports, charities, and personal causes like travel. As with most crowdfunding platforms, Crowdfunder users can include meaningful incentives to motivate people to donate. Uniquely, you can also run a prize draw if you have a covetable or exciting reward that you can offer, be it digital products or physical gifts that will put a smile on the face of your supporters.
INSIDER TIPShow gratitude and appreciation to your donors beyond a simple “thank you” email. Let them know they will receive proof of how their money has been used. It never hurts for them to see evidence of the impact they made.