Do you track if the emails are opened and read?

Yes. 55% open rate.

But if you agree to accept 3 articles a day from HFP (we send 21 per week, each article separately) then you are keen and seriously want to read it.

This makes no sense. We have 15,000 people on our list. I doubt I get one request per year directly to remove someone - the other 99.9% unsubscribe themselves. The 'Unsubscribe' is clear on every email, as per MailChimp requirements.

What is more likely is that Ben's emails ended up being sent from a server used by a spammer who was closed down and Ben was caught in the crossfire. Hard to believe they'd close him down given that MailChimp can clearly see he has been operating trouble-free for years.

It really depends on how the email list back end is set up. For the short period of time that I used MailChimp for a small nonprofit, we didn't have an automated remove feature (I had a link that generated a web page that said unsubscribe successful, and then on the back end, an email was generated and sent to me informing me of such, and I'd have to manually go in and scrub. It was just a monthly newsletter so I didn't automate anything, I mainly used MailChimp for statistics)

I'd imagine that you and others with a large web presence such as Lucky would have an automated system in place to allow people to unsubscribe themselves (where the system would automatically scrub their email address from the list). But the key point here is the assumption that it works. If there's any sort of error where the recipient isn't successfully unsubscribed, or the unsubscribe link is deceptive in where it only unsubscribes from one type of email but not others, MailChimp doesn't care, you're now a spammer in their eyes.

Interesting... I wondered how this could be calculated, and just found the answer on the MailChimp site.

With HFP, I tend to read the headline, and then if there's anything that interests me, I'll read the rest.

So, I probably fully read about 50% of the emails.

DYKWIA, this is why image blocking and other privacy-enhancing measures are taken by some internet users. But most miles and points forum readers don’t do a whole lot to help themselves on that as much as they try to help themselves with the miles and points game.

Do they also supply you information on the IP addresses from where those emails are opened? I would have to assume they could have a good idea of where the “readership” is. Do they tell you that too?

I would assume that your readership (and the value gotten from that) is less heavily dependent upon US users than OMAAT.

I have the location data but it is based on where the initial sign-up was done from rather than where any particular email was read. Annoyingly it isn't aggregated anywhere (I think) so I don't actually know what the split is overall. Website traffic is 80% UK, 10% US and dribs and drabs from elsewhere. You also see what device emails are usually read on, click through rates and indeed exactly which emails a person opened. Not that I spend a single second actually looking at any of this info!

Thats kind of stupid though... knowing the demographics of each of your channels is pure gold in terms of positioning yourself to advertisers. Usually the 'sign up for our newsletter and get everything in you mailbox' is a data gathering excercise by blogs and groups.

When you’re not much of a stalker, it doesn’t surprise me that you wouldn’t spend a single second drilling down like that (even as there may be some juicy nuggets in there, maybe even some gold). The same can’t be said about other online parts of the miles and points world, parts where the stalker mentality is more deeply engrained and used against one or more audience members whether or not there is a cash cow in the rough still left.

As in the title, HFP made an error, they reported non refundable stays upto June 30th can be refunded..

Please all dont do what I did,, check BEFORE cancelling...Hotel is very happy to have me cancel and take the money..Cheers HFP..

In fairness I have screen shots of the policy that says 30th June, before reverting back to end of April some time mid afternoon UK time. Seems either the policy was released prematurely, franchisees kicked up a fuss, or IT wasn't ready. Will be interesting to see whether it does change back to June again in the next couple of days.

It is back to 30th June this morning on the ihg UK website:

https://www.ihg.com/content/gb/en/cu...ravel-advisory

Oh please, do me a favour.

IHG put up its new policy on Sunday afternoon (and indeed it was cut and pasted on this forum soon afterwards).

I did a cut and paste (slightly more elegantly, but still basically a cut and paste) into an article on Monday morning, with multiple links back to the source document so readers could confirm for themselves.

IHG pulled it on Monday afternoon, at which point we put a warning note into our article. As you will have seen, it was back up this morning.

In what way I am I responsible for this?!

What favor do you want?
Sign up through your site for credit card that will be pulled..
Your info was wrong..end of..

You should have signed up for the IHG Premium card when we recommended it and before it was pulled :-) You wouldn't have missed out then. It's not going anywhere for those who already have it.

We don't actually get paid for more than half of the credit cards we write about, including the IHG ones. We cover them all because it's the right thing to do.