While news and other editorial has always remained free in TTG magazine, on social media, and most recently for the first 10 stories a month read by readers, we’ve now opened up the site again after a significant number of readers told us that they simply could not contemplate paying for editorial content during the pandemic.

With the effects of the crisis now deeper and longer lasting than any of us suspected they would be in the summer of 2020, it’s a sensible step we can take to support the trade, while continuing to ensure our own business resilience in other ways.

As TTG has done since 2018 we will still ask readers to register a small amount of data with us before reading our content. We think that’s a fair trade – and a huge number of people in the travel industry are already registered. During 2020 registered users rose from 19,000 to more than 40,000 and the number has continued to climb this year.

TTG+ will now continue to evolve in other ways for our members, with new investment in some of the key features that a number of you have said make a real difference after they were borne out of in-depth consultation with the trade in 2020. These include:

• Live online events, often providing access to government ministers and enabling live questions;
  
  
• The Travel Agent Tracker – our fortnightly research programme which has been used since the beginning of the crisis to track the sentiment and experiences of travel agents;
  
  
• More live briefings directly with Editor Sophie Griffiths and other members of the TTG team;
  
  
• 10% discounts on event tickets and entries; and
  
  
• The unique full archive of the Travel Trade Gazette, running from the first edition in March 1953 up to the present day.

One year on from the launch of TTG+, these digital membership benefits will remain at the heart of the business as we continue to find new ways to support the travel community – beginning later this month with the first Travel Industry Awards by TTG, in association with Virgin Atlantic, taking place at Magazine London on the Greenwich Peninsula on 30 September.

TTG has always worked in close partnership with the trade – and ultimately, we don’t have any qualms about saying TTG is a business too. Just as so many travel businesses have evolved in sometimes unexpected ways during the pandemic, TTG will also continue to evolve and stretch the ways in which we connect the industry, as the brand has done for the last 68 years.

We hope you come with us as we continue to that for another six decades and beyond!

Daniel Pearce is CEO of TTG Media.