Featured image: Running a small business serving women is a joy! / Photo by thanyapatm from Envato
And some insight into how websites work
We’re often asked by our readers how they can support JourneyWoman. We’re grateful for that question — it shows us just how much you care.
Here’s how, along with some context on what we believe.
You may not realize it, but websites are not free to run. It costs thousands of dollars each month just for JourneyWoman to exist. We pay for a website manager, a website hosting service, antivirus/spam software, photography licensing, cybersecurity insurance, website software and many other things too detailed to mention.
Most websites make at least half their revenue from digital advertising (these are the ads that appear automatically on a digital property like a website or app).
However, we’ve taken a different approach.
On our website, you won’t find any flying ads, videos or pop-ups from companies you’ve never heard of. Why? Because we think it disrupts the reading experience. It makes it hard for a reader to finish articles. And it devalues the hard work our writers have put into sharing their first-hand, inspiring stories with you.
Do you know how websites make money?
When a website has digital advertising, it means that you make that website money every time you visit it, or click on a website article, because it means your eyeballs are on their ads (this is called views). Even if the ads just fly by, that website is still making money from your views.
If you happen to click on the ad and purchase a product, the website makes even more money. This is why many websites write such provocative headlines with no real substance, just to get you to visit and then click. Websites with thousands or millions of views make a lot of money from digital advertising.
One example is CNN. With 150 million unique global visitors monthly, CNN generates an estimated $10 million to $30 million+ per month entirely from digital advertising, according to Forbes.
We chose purpose over profit
However, at JourneyWoman, we made a decision NOT do this early on, because we respect you, the reader. We think there is nothing worse than trying to read an article with various ads flying by, or pop-up videos that disrupt the reading experience.
As a result, there is no digital advertising on our website. When you see a banner ad on our website, we designed it ourselves so that it’s relevant to you, our reader. This means can trust that the articles on our site are written with a purposeful intent to inspire, educate or provoke a discussion. Not to sell you products we don’t use.
Of course, other website owners will tell you that ‘digital advertising is the way it has always been done’, and that we’re crazy not to embrace it, but we try to play by our own rules, even if it makes things a little more challenging. We’re up for it.
Everything on our site is recommended by women
JourneyWoman has always been a place where we share products and services that we use or are recommended by our readers and community. For over 30 years, we’ve curated thousands of recommendations from women through our Facebook group, email tips and conversations, which are shared throughout the site and in our newsletters.
We are also very careful about the companies we recommend. Two years ago, we stopped actively promoting Amazon, except where there is no alternative, and switched to Bookshop.org and other platforms to support small, independent businesses. In most cases, we link any product recommendations right through to the seller, versus a third-party. (See our Amazon Alternatives article from 2025 here).
What does it cost to run JourneyWoman?
Without digital advertising, we must be very creative to find other ways to support our small business. Make no mistake – while JourneyWoman has the ethos of a non-profit, we always been a business, since 1994.
However, websites are becoming increasingly expensive to run. Running a website in Canada is extremely costly (and we have two, including our Women’s Travel Directory). Most of our operational costs are in US dollars because of global consolidation.
As you can see, most of our costs go into producing editorial, including paying our writers, our website designer to lay out articles, licensing photography, our email platform (we pay for each email to be stored), producing our podcast and travel costs for our own independent travel. Running our website includes an incredible array of software, hosting services, and many other things (about 30% of our overall cost). We also invest in marketing and social media to amplify our editorial. Like any business, we have operational costs like bookkeeping and insurance. We donate regularly to non-profit associations including The Ally Group Foundation (anti-human trafficking) and The Period Purse, as well as a scholarship for wmnsWORK to support entrepreneurs.
Most of our costs are to produce editorial and run our website / JourneyWoman
Behind the scenes: our team and our writers
As a Canadian-based company, we hire Canadians to help run our small business. We run JourneyWoman with a small team of passionate, dedicated women who manage our website, social media and marketing. Several have been with us for years, like Stephanie, our website manager, who works tirelessly to bring you a smooth, seamless website experience and recently introduced a new ‘mega’ navigation to help you explore our site even more.
While some websites use AI-generated articles or hire paid influencers, we believe in the authority and credibility of professional travel writers, while making sure we are representative of you, our readers. Although it may look glamorous, travel writing is A LOT of work — not only do we travel to many remote places around the world, we research, write, edit, take photographs, fact check and interview sources to make sure our articles are of the highest quality. JourneyWoman pays 28 freelance travel writers, all covering various aspects of the travel experience, from small ship travel to adventure travel, midlife reinvention and more. We also compensate our speakers for their expertise at our webinars and events.
So how do we make money?
Since we don’t make money from digital ads, we’ve had to be creative. We do have ads on our site, bur we design them all ourselves, to make sure they are relevant, with appropriate imagery of women over 50.
We could charge a membership fee for our editorial, or put up a firewall. But that has never been JourneyWoman’s way. We believe that all women should have access to information to stay safe while travelling, regardless of economic situation.
Last year, we introduced our first paid newsletter, Smitten, which curates practical travel tips from women and features inspiring women from our community. Smitten is issued every other Monday. You can subscribe to it for about $4 a month here.
This year, we expanded our publishing efforts with our new monthly ‘Ageless Adventuress” travel podcast, thanks to our sponsors and partners. It has been so popular that we’re hoping to do it more often, if we’re able to get financial support from sponsors. Like websites, podcasts aren’t free either – there are costs for recording, editing, production and marketing.
The world’s first Women’s Travel Directory
Our main revenue source is our Women’s Travel Directory, which is the only Diretory of its kind in the world. Originally started by JourneyWoman founder Evelyn Hannon over 20 years ago, we’ve expanded this to include more than 150 women-owned and led businesses from around the world. And it’s growing quickly, with all the momentum on women 50+ travel.
We interview and vet each business, which pays an annual membership fee depending on the size of their business. Smaller businesses pay a nominal fee, and larger ones pay more.
We also create campaigns for our partners to help them strengthen their brands, through editorial, mailings, social media, contests and trips. All sponsored campaigns are marked clearly and explained in our disclaimers at the end of any articles. We don’t write about trips we haven’t been on or places we haven’t travelled to.
We promote our partners’ trips to you on our website, our HOT FLASH emails and on social media. We also organize special trips for JourneyWoman readers with exclusive discounts from some partners, like our annual trip to see the Northern Lights with Hurtigruten. We make a small amount of commission on some trips, but not all, which helps us cover our costs.
Research and advisory services
With Carolyn Ray’s background in consulting, we also offer research and advisory services to larger companies to create real change for solo women and women 50+. We help them develop new products for solo women or all-women experiences (like Aurora Expeditions’ first women-only cruise to Antarctica, which we helped design and launch). We find it very fulfilling to be changing the travel industry on behalf of our readers, and value your participation in our surveys.
We also work with some tourism boards to help them understand what women 50+ are looking for in their countries. We aspire to work with more destinations on making travel more inclusive for all, as we’ve done with Spain for several years.
Another first…. our Places to Stay Directory
Last year, in response to survey feedback from you, our readers, we added a new “Places to Stay” section, featuring hotels and accommodations to our Directory. This includes hotel reviews from our writers, unique accommodations and a form where women can share their recommended hotels in a searchable directory.
We built this from scratch ourselves, because nothing existed at the time.
Women can share, search and find women-friendly hostels, monasteries, vilas, and more. When you book a hotel using our site, we earn a small commission at no cost to you, from booking.com or Expedia, but you must book in that moment, or we lose any commission.
Expanding our Women’s Travel Directory with TourRadar
We don’t book or operate tours, so this year, we announced a groundbreaking partnership with TourRadar to extend this Directory onto a booking platform so that it’s even easier for you to find, compare pricing across companies and book travel. This partnership offers women unprecedented access to the best possible pricing and experiences while supporting our Directory partners. This site simplifies the process by showing women all the companies at a glance, with the same pricing and discounts they have on their sites.
We make a small amount of commission on any trips sold (usually around $100 per trip), which helps offsets our work developing the site with TourRadar. As you may know, most travel agents make between 10-20% on trips sold, so our return is far less.
Collaborating with destinations
To help destinations become safer and more inclusive for women, we also work with tourism boards on marketing campaigns. This is particularly exciting because these campaigns are based on research and insights from you, our readers, through surveys or polls on our Facebook group, and our own experiences.
One recent example of this is our “Solo in Spain” campaign, which features JourneyWoman reader feedback. More recently, we negotiated an exclusive offer for JourneyWoman readers with the Parador hotels in Spain.
We have more countries asking us to help them which is wonderful.
How can you support JourneyWoman?
As a small business, JourneyWoman has been funded mostly through individual efforts, primarily with funds from our CEO Carolyn Ray, who has invested her savings in building and maintaining our website, hiring a team to service our readers and partners and expanding our services. Our goal is not to be a large business, but we do need to make enough money to support our team and the services we provide.
If you want to help us continue into our fourth decade, here are FIVE easy things you can do:
1. Recommend us to your friends: JourneyWoman has always relied on word of mouth. Women recommending us to other women. The biggest thing you can do, which costs nothing, is to share JourneyWoman with your networks and friends and invite them to join our mailing list at JourneyWoman.com – it’s free!
Then, participate. Comment on our articles. Subscribe to our YouTube channel Or join our thriving Solo Travel Wisdom group on Facebook to get inspired and find first-hand tips. Raise your questions, issues and concerns. Your voice matters to us. Many of our articles, ideas, tips are from our readers. We simply can’t exist without you.
2. Choose to travel with the small businesses in our Women’s Travel Directory. All of these tour companies, hotels and travel advisors are vetted and interviewed by our team and pay a low annual fee, once approved, to be in our Directory. Usually, you can deal directly with the CEO of a woman-owned business who values your support. Make sure you tell them you heard about them on JourneyWoman and use our exclusive codes for perks. Visit our Directory here.
3. Use the links on our site to purchase products or book travel experiences: You may see links in articles or banners that say “click here” for companies like Booking.com, Trainline or Eatwith. When you’re booking a hotel or train, click on these links, as it provides us with a small commission from the company at no cost to you. These links only work for a few hours or days so come back when you’ve decided to book and click on them again.
4. Use our TourRadar platform to book trips. When you book a trip on our JourneyWoman Directory on TourRadar, you are getting the same pricing as on that company’s website but with additional benefits that allow you the flexibility to hold or inquire about trips. Look for our name, logo and red bar across the top and book trips there and we receive a small commission at no cost to you. Find it here.
5. Digital products: We have been working to expand our digital products, including ebooks and courses. Yon can purchase our first ebook “Never Too Late: How Women 50+ Are Making the Rules” or our Packing and Slow Travel ebooks and cybersecurity course here.
We also have a bi-monthly solo travel tips subscription newsletter called Smitten, which has exclusive discounts, curated travel tips and features a JourneyWoman reader in every issue. Smitten is about $4 a month (for two issues) and helps offset the need for digital advertising. You can subscribe here.
If none of this appeal to you, you can make a one-time or recurring contribution, which will be used to fund our non-profit partnerships with The Period Purse (period poverty), Ally Foundation (human trafficking) and wmnsWORK (scholarship for LGBTQ+ and women entrepreneurs). You can do that here.
It’s our honour and privilege to serve women
As the world’s first solo travel resource, JourneyWoman is best known as an award-winning website that inspires women to travel through our editorial. But we also want to help make travel safer and more inclusive for all. Together, we can shift the narrative, create change and show mature women that they are seen and valued. Thank you for being a part of our community and our movement. We see you. We value you. We love you!
The post How You Can Support JourneyWoman, the Original Solo Travel Publication for Women appeared first on JourneyWoman.