TiP Telegram Chat (Award Booking Channel Added)

Update #2: Due to popular demand, I’ve also launched a channel for award booking and travel related chatter.

Update: “sensitive chatter” TiP group is closed. You may join the generalTiP group through the link provided below. Future recruitment for sensitive chatter group may happen through the public TiP group.

I’ve officially opened up a telegram group for readers of this site. Yes there was one before but it was very hus-hus to a point that only one link existed to it and said link was hidden behind two consecutive passwords.

Who Can Join?

Any site readers can join by simply clicking through the links below. By making these an “invite only” group, I ensure that they remain small, friendly and manageable. These telegram groups are not searchable in Telegram i.e. random Telegram users can’t search for “travel” or “award” keyword and end up in these channels.

General Guidelines

• absolutely no disrespectful behavior towards other members of the group or anyone else
• no disruptive behavior

Objective of General Chat

LINK TO JOIN GENERAL CHAT

tg://join?invite=H22UuwuD-kZb65Nvl7Kdbw

• discuss news
• discuss public deals
• questions are fine but I ask you to do basic reading on your own

Objective of Award Booking Chat

LINK TO JOIN AWARD BOOKING CHAT

tg://join?invite=H22Uu0XsckjEYG1-_LUwpg

• talk about your recent trips
• share pictures if you like
• ask or offer help for award booking
• humble brag is allowed

Objective of “SENSITIVE DEAL” Chat

LINK TO JOIN “SENSITIVE DEAL” CHAT

currently recruitment is closed (link is occasionally shared in above channels)

• this is not a place to discuss news and general deals
• definitely no general questions
• discuss time-sensitive deals
• discuss quantity-sensitive deals
• anything that can’t be discussed in general chat

Why Telegram of All The Apps?

A popular question I get asked is “Why not Slack group?” Because the free version of Slack has message limits. It isn’t viable for me to pay to increase/remove message limits and I don’t feel like asking readers to do that for me either.

Now to answer “Why Telegram?”…well, it is mostly because many of us already use it and are very satisfied by it. The search feature in Telegram is decent. I don’t need tons of mini-chat rooms for this site. Telegram allows sharing of pics in high quality so that is a plus as well.

Why The Necessity for a Private Groups?

Previously, I shared rare deals to subscribers via a password locked posts. At the time it was an okay thing to do because this site was small and if you somehow found your way to this site then you were likely wise enough to keep your mouth shut. Additionally, because I never actively advertised the site (I still don’t) or talked about perks of being a subscriber, my sub list wasn’t troublesome.

My sub list is still very small but because I had no control on who can and cannot subscribe, I started to rethink if I should be sharing sensitive content through such means anymore. Finally, after many months of going back and forth, I’ve decided to continue sharing some sensitive deals through password protected posts but the idea is to reserve more sensitive ones to chat. This decision also pushed me to finally fixing some, of many, bugs with email subscriptions.

Rome Wasn’t Build in a Day

The group isn’t going to become 0 to hero in day one. I can say for certainty that it will take several months to take it where I want it to be.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

was I banned?

generally speaking, I don’t ban users. You were most likely kicked.

why was I kicked?

Periodically I purge users from chat.

can i join back in after getting kicked?

Unless you were banned, you can join back into the general and award chatter chat room. You’ll have to wait for another recruitment drive to join into the sensitive deal chatroom.

I just joined….why does the chatroom look so empty?

some of the above mentioned chatrooms do not allow new users to see messages that were shared during the time they were not there. This is intentional and will not be changed.