Membership of the London IBM Retirees Club brings many benefits, notably the continuity of contact with ex-colleagues and the opportunity to form new friendships by participating in our events.
In financial terms, members usually benefit from paying lower prices for events by us obtaining group discounts. For example, with theatre tickets, this usually means members can get top-price tickets for around half of what they would pay if they purchase individually. We can normally obtain and apply attractive group discounts on day trips and holidays.
The vast majority of the club’s income comes from the sale of tickets for the events we run. We also make a (very small) amount of interest on the cash held in one of our bank accounts. We have no other sources of income. We do not charge a membership fee and have no intention to introduce one.
Similarly, the vast majority of our expenditure goes towards paying the organisations for tickets to those events we advertise and sell via our website. But we also have ancillary costs that need to be covered somehow. For example, to run this website we have to pay third parties for: hosting, domain name services, software licences and storage.
The way we cover the ancillary costs is that we add a small markup to the price of each ticket we buy before selling it on to our members. Thus, if a price is quoted on your ticket for an event, it may well be lower than the price we charge you for the ticket. We make no apology for this; without the markup this club could not exist.
The club is run entirely by volunteers. We encourage and value your feedback.