Travelwatchdog was created in June 2002 as a voluntary service to try to bridge the gap between the power of the travel giants and the individual consumer. To guarantee the independence and integrity of our operation, we resolved that for three years we would not take any advertising and would fund the costs of the equipment and site from our own resources. This we have achieved. Over the three years we have built up a comprehensive profile of the travel industry, receiving more than 100,000 travel related complaints from consumers in 31 different countries who believed that their holidays and/or travel were degraded to some extent by travel agents, tour operators or travel related services.

With thousands of unique visitors each month, site traffic is now at a level where the costs of equipment and hosting services are beyond our personal resources and our continued existence is dependent upon procuring limited financial support. In consequence, we have started to accept a small number of advertisements from travel related companies of impeccable credentials, i.e. companies who are recognised as providing consumers with exceptional service. We refuse all advertising from any company about whom we have received a complaint, proven or not, or any company that has not been conducting its travel business for at least three years. If any of our advertisers subsequently become the subject of a valid complaint, they are dumped immediately!

The consequence for advertisers is that they are guaranteed fellow advertisers who are above reproach. For consumers, they have the guarantee that any advertiser featured on the site has not been the subject of any form of complaint to travelwatchdog over the life of the site (4 years at March 2007).

Companies who would like to advertise on the index page of the Travelwatchdog site or http://www.transsiberian.org and meet the criteria should contact advertising@travelwatchdog.com (to avoid spam, this is not hotlinked, please copy and paste into your e-mail client)

How to Advertise

Various types of link are available. However, according to Site Pro News research not all links are equal and links that are mutually exchanged are detected by search engines and are of little effect in improving search engine ratings. What is important is quality and the ranking of the site on which the link is situated. Travelwatchdog ranks highly in Google both with its main domain name and its mapped 'badtravel.com' name. In response to the search word 'travelwatchdog' most of the top ranked pages are from this site. For the search word 'watchdog' this site ranks in the top ten. Travelwatchdog also ranks in the top ten for a host of other search terms. If you want to improve your site rating, Travelwatchdog advertising can help, and at a modest cost.