ABOUT US
Starts at 60 – the platform
The #1 website for over-60s in Australia
Starts at 60 is Australia’s #1 platform for digital-savvy over-60s serving more than a million over-60s online each month with news and media, retirement-relevant information, travel, and member deals.
Our mission is simple:
1. to curate to the needs and wants of over-60s online and;
2. To get members a better deal wherever possible through the power of our huge online community
Over-60s sign up for Starts at 60 online, complete their profile and tell us their interests then we do all the hard work – bringing you amazing deals, exciting travel offers and the news and views you need when approaching and in retirement.
We’ve built Starts at 60 over more than 8 years through the power of community into our big pillars that serve over-60s online. We explain each of these below.
NEWS
Starts at 60 News & Media
News, views and expert insights and what people are talking about, every day.
Starts at 60 is an award-winning media brand that publishes the must-know news and views every day plus helpful information from a stable of nationally-recognised experts on health, money, lifestyle and more. Starts at 60 News and Media also runs our semi-regular Starts at 60 Online Masterclasses designed to help you navigate retirement issues. Take the time to sign up for and have a look at our media channels:
Starts at 60 News and Media Website: The Starts at 60 News and Media website publishes at startsat60.com/media 7 days a week. Our combination of news, current affairs discussions, health, money, retirement lifestyle and travel information from some of Australia’s leading experts.
Starts at 60 Daily eDM: The daily news eDM from Starts at 60 sends a digest of our best news and media to our members/subscribers each day. You need to sign up for Starts at 60 to receive this emailer.
Starts at 60 Facebook: The Starts at 60 Facebook page is a hugely engaged wall of more than 800,000 over-60s keenly seeking the content we publish. Our engagement ratios on Facebook equals or exceeds most of the largest media companies in Australian media.
Starts at 60 Masterclasses: Starts at 60 host online media Q&A style masterclasses with expert panellists on subjects that can help over-60s live better lives. These events span finance, travel and health subjects. Our members find out about these events and can RSVP to attend online.
TRAVEL
Travel at 60
The travel marketplace and full service travel agency just for over-60s.
Travel at 60 is our online travel marketplace and an AFTA licensed, full-service travel agency with an experienced team to guide you through any booking.
Our call-centre based travel agent team have built a great reputation for knowing their stuff – giving good advice on and placing bookings for over-60s on cruises, tours, package holidays, airline tickets, accommodation and car hire.
Our travel packaging team have worked extremely hard to bring you a broad selection of holiday packages and community tours that sell quickly whenever we release them. Take a look at the Starts at 60 Community holidays listed here … they’re an extremely popular way to see Australia and New Zealand.
Travel at 60 is proud to work the most reputable suppliers in the travel industry, ensuring we have direct access to the cruises, tours, packaged holidays, flights, accommodation and activities you want. And, where possible, our operator partners bring us great prices on travel options that travel companies might want to offer over-60s who are more flexible to ‘fill them up’ knowing many over-60s can travel midweek or in shoulder seasons where there might be gaps.
Travel at 60 regularly releases limited offers, hot deals and exclusives to members via email! The best deals are sent out to our membership by email first so they can snap up a good deal.
MEMBER DEAL CENTRE
The Starts at 60 Member Centre
The growing hub for all kinds of member value
Our Member Deal Centre centralises curated deals spanning across health, finance, lifestyle, utilities and more for the Starts at 60 audience into one convenient portal – a bit like a national Seniors Card, but on demand and delightfully digital.
COMMUNITY & EVENTS
Starts at 60 Community Activities and Events
Our community has decided they like to gather, engage and meet, voluntarily building their own range of events, activities, groups and connections. These have been formed organically through our huge online/offline community reach and the goodwill that people have for this stage of life. Members use Starts at 60 to find people like them and connect and share. We show you all the ways you can join in below.
Go on a Starts at 60 Community Holiday
Travel at 60, our travel agency and travel packaging team create a regularly stream of Starts at 60 Community Holidays so you can travel with like-minded over-60s to destinations all over Australia and New Zealand. And, when the world reopens, we’ll take these to international destinations too.
We’re also creating some fabulous event-based holidays, like our recent Starts at 60 Fraser Island Seventies Festival and our Hunter Valley Christmas in July.
Our holidays are well-organised tours or events, packed with adventure, to both regional and urban destinations. They’re a great way to enjoy the company of others and travel in the safety, knowing our helpful team and our partners are looking after your needs every step of the way. It’s important to note that our community holidays sell fast so you might need to get in quick if you want to attend! See our Community Holidays here.
Attend Starts at 60 Meetups
The Starts at 60 Meetups are volunteer-run daytime coffee events in almost every state, co-ordinated by a dedicated group of community members. Members meet in coffee shops usually on the first Tuesday of every month to chat, make friends and meet new people. Events are listed on the Starts at 60 website and you do need to RSVP as some events are at almost-full-capacity the coffee venue can hold!
Pitch us a story
Members with a skill for writing can pitch blogs or real life stories to our community Editor that may be selected for publication on Starts at 60 News & Media. We publish real-life stories of retirement that would be valued by others and have a range of subjects that we accept publication in. We invite people who would like to blog for us to pitch their subject to our Community Editor at [email protected]. A limited number of stories are selected for publishing each month.
Join us on Social Media and join our interest groups
We have two massive Facebook pages which we think everyone over-60 in Australia and New Zealand should follow:
Starts at 60 – like our page
Travel at 60 – like our page
We also have a growing following on Instagram and Pinterest
Follow us on Instagram – join us here
Follow us on Pinterest – join us here
Over the years a range of Facebook groups have sprouted organically, bringing together conversations around specific interests of over-60s. These are a fantastic series of communities. We encourage you to join the conversations in groups that you feel fit your own interests:
The Official Starts at 60 Facebook Group – join here
Starts at 60 Shopping Lovers – join here
Travel at 60 Travel Lovers – join here
Starts at 60 Crafters – join here
Starts at 60 Book Club – join here
Starts at 60 Gardeners – join here
A POTTED HISTORY OF STARTS AT 60
Starts at 60 – The early years
Starts at 60 was founded in 2013 as a platform to serve digital-savvy over-60s. Our founder, Rebecca Wilson was watching as her parent’s turned 60, embracing retirement, travel, health and finances with a new expectation other generations before them hadn’t had. They wanted the best! It was ‘their turn’. But there was nothing online dedicated to this stage of life in Australia and New Zealand.
We started in news and media, where we built startsat60.com, a blog for over 60s that grew up fast into the #1 digital media brand for older Australians serving to our high quality, award winning media website for this generation, packing it daily with relevant news, expert information and helpful guiding content.
The community embraced us warmly on social media and on our own website making us one of the most engaged media audiences on Facebook in Australia. Hundreds of thousands of over-60s signed up for daily newsletters, and millions engaged with our content across the internet each month!
Talking to over-60s through news, media and social media helped us to more deeply understand their problems and desires. To help our community, we tried to seek out solutions for this generation that they could trust. That’s when we realised there are very few companies speaking directly to this generation and even fewer curating great products and solutions for them to enjoy. And those that are, struggle to reach the digital-savvy over-60s with ease.
So we decided to broaden our mandate and become a larger and even more helpful platform that everyone could trust to reach and bring value to this generation. We started this adventure in travel with the launch and growth of Travel at 60 into Australia’s largest specialist over-60s online/offline travel company.
Somewhere in the middle of the two we started to develop an insurance brand too, launching car insurance as our first insurance offering.
Throughout the 8 years of operations we have developed strong relationships with advertisers and partners who respect the over-60s as much as we do and are keenly bringing them solutions. We have worked with extraordinary brands and companies like Household Capital, Westpac Group, Uber, ANZ, BT Fund Management, GSK, Nestle Health Science, Connect Hearing, Bupa, Tourism NT, Stockland, Ingenia, Lend Lease and many many more. If you have an interest in advertising respectfully to over-60s please contact us on [email protected].
Over the years our business has welcomed some terrific shareholders that truly believe in what we are doing, including Seven West Media Investments, Hollard Insurance and the Queensland Government Business Development Fund as well as a selection of experienced private investors. It is with their support that we look forward to an exciting future serving over-60s across Australia and New Zealand.
HIGHLIGHTS
We won Media Brand of the Year
Starts at 60 is regularly nominated for awards, but the most memorable on our journey was our first big award, the Mumbrella Media Brand of the Year in Australia in July 2017. We were against brands like Vice, Taste and Cricket Australia. At just four years old, our little business, hard-working team, and dedicated group of community writers loved this recognition, and it went a long way to helping more people understand what Starts at 60 is all about.
HIGHLIGHTS
We won a Silver Fern for our stylish and vibrant brand
Many people assume that 60-somethings are ‘old’ (and we know you’re not!). We decided we needed to be able to show the world just how vibrant and energetic the Starts at 60 community is, so we went back to the drawing board and rebuilt our brand around our values and the values of our community. Bright colours, high contrast, and the bold ‘60’ emblem were launched and everyone loved it. We were all proud of being a place where over-60s could make their voice heard. And the new logo won a world-standard Silver Fern in brand design in July 2017, so we knew we weren’t alone in thinking it was cool!
HIGHLIGHTS
We launched Travel at 60 as a full service travel agency and travel marketplace
In 2018 we decided over-60s deserved a properly curated travel service that would be interested in and serve their needs. We launched Travel at 60 and started to promote it – and made our first booking on the very first day of operation! The team at this time was small, but we grew rapidly with demand from over-60s.
HIGHLIGHTS
We hosted our first Starts at 60 Group Holidays
Back in August 2019 we knew over-60s wanted to travel together so we set about testing our first ever Starts at 60 Community Holiday. Our first departure to Fraser Island for whale watching was exciting and so successful it kicked off many many more and a huge following for our community holidays.
HIGHLIGHTS
We launched Starts at 60 Masterclasses
In the depths of Covid-19 with our community all locked in their homes and the threat of bank branches closing there was suddenly an urgent need to help over-60s move faster into internet tools.
From this spawned our first online Starts at 60 Masterclass in partnership with Westpac who wanted to help over-60s get online in a hurry in those uncertain times. More than 2000 people attended online live.
This started our Masterclass series – regular online educational events with expert panelists helping over-60s navigate retirement.
HIGHLIGHTS
Our first TV commercial hit the screens in 2019
Our first television commercials ran nationally on the Seven Network in 2018 with Jean Kittson as Starts at 60 Ambassador. It certainly kickstarted the growth of Travel at 60.
HIGHLIGHTS
We welcomed Seven West Media as an investor in 2016
Back in 2016 we got a great shot in the arm for the future of Starts at 60 when the team at Seven West Media Investments backed us to build a strong platform that would serve over-60s online. With their’s and other investors backing over the years we have been able to invest in technology, staff and marketing so that over-60s could find us and our platform could become the high quality experience it is today. Rest assured we remain completely editorially independent from our shareholders and our members only benefit from their involvement.
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