At minimum, I assume if I sign up you're going to start emailing me, and I haven't even seen enough to decide if I'm actually interested yet.

Worst case (often the case) those email addresses get collected and eventually sold off to some marketing spam list that just adds more junk to my inbox and adds a little bit more information to some marketing profile about me somewhere.

A video demo would definitely help demonstrate that at least there's a "there" there.

Not OP but have the same frustration, and no a video would not be helpful. Let users maybe view the first N items of an itinerary before requiring an account to see the full thing. As-is I have no incentive to sign up for an account because everything interesting is account-walled.

Letting the public trips be visible would make the most sense. I'll create an account when I'd like to make my own trip.