Introduction
Everyone wants to travel to new places and see new things. Traveling the world has been on the bucket list of almost every individual these days. Many people want to travel to escape from their daily routine for a little while. This will give them new energy once they get back to their normal lives. People want to travel for adventure and pleasure. Many people think sometimes they are just stuck in their lives and it is going nowhere. They feel like they are just working to earn money just to pay their bills. People don’t feel like they are doing something that is challenging. So they crave for experiences that are different and exciting. Traveling is the best way to get these experiences. It allows people to push their limits and get out of their comfort zones to get to know new things. People will learn to be more resourceful when they go to new places and do new things.
When people travel to different places they will experience a different world altogether. Because most of the people are accustomed to seeing things that are only done in one way. But when a person travels they will get to know how things are done differently in different places. You will get educated when you travel to places. One will see different cultures, their history, cuisine, and geography of those places. Every destination you go to you will get to learn something new. Not only these but people also travel for other reasons like spirituality. Because you are seeing and experiencing things on the first hand the things you learn will stay with you for your entire life. This will help people realize that there is no specific way of living. One will understand that not everyone looks at the world as they do. They will get to know that different people have different perspectives. Some people don’t have an idea of how different life is in some parts of the world.
Getting away from your daily routine will give you an opportunity to spend more time with yourself. It will give you time to reflect on your own life. Traveling is the best way to know and learn more about yourself. When you face unfamiliar situations in a place that is completely alien they will help you know more about you. This will also make you appreciate your life even more. When you stay for years and years at the same place you will start taking it for granted. You don’t really understand its importance and value. But when you spend time traveling you will learn to appreciate what you have and where you live. This will help people in strengthening their relationships with people both personally and professionally. But the most important thing travel does to people is to rejuvenate them. Traveling helps people to get disconnected from their daily pressures and helps them enjoy the moment. Maybe this is the reason why the travel industry is growing every year.
How do Travel affiliate programs work?
According to various reports, the travel industry is the second fastest-growing sector in the entire world. Every year the travel industry produces millions of jobs and contributes tons of money to the global economy. Anything may happen but people all around the world always want to travel. This is not a big surprise as you yourself would love to travel the world someday. The travel industry is contributing nearly 9 trillion dollars to the world economy every year. This is a great thing for affiliate marketers because with an industry this big they will have plenty of products to promote and make money. Getting a small piece from this large pie would not be that difficult of a job.
But there are lots of questions in the minds of affiliate marketers when it comes to travel affiliate programs. They often feel like it is not worth promoting travel affiliate programs. Affiliate marketers also feel like they won’t be able to make much when they promote travel affiliate programs. All of these are just misconceptions and they are not to be taken seriously. Travel affiliate programs offer some of the best commissions an affiliate marketer could wish for. Affiliate marketers often do not understand the sheer number of different opportunities and routes they have in this field of affiliate marketing. There are lots of things a travel site can talk about. For example, an affiliate marketer can talk about services that offer them cheap flight tickets or services that will show them the best hotel deals in the places they are traveling to.
People can also promote products and other services that are associated with traveling or tourism. This niche offers a lot of potential for travel bloggers then you can imagine. These products and services are very legitimate because all of them are tried and tested in real-world situations. The travel industry market can be divided based on type reasons and regions they are trying to visit. They can be divided on the basis of continent, country, city, interests, budget, events, and age group of the people. So when these number of different categories and programs available it becomes very easy to promote travel affiliate programs. Not only that you also have countless ways in which you can combine different options you can combine to promote on your website.
One can spend a lot of time and money to build a website that exclusively promotes travel services and products. But it may not be as successful as you want it to be when it goes live. This is one thing that is very common for affiliate marketers that really new and they feel very first rated when this happens. It is a harsh reality they have to face but they can overcome all this if they just follow a few tactics. If they can implement some of the things perfectly then they can bring in a lot of traffic to their website.
High-quality traffic is very important because it can help you reach your goals by getting conversions. It is not just about getting the non-targeted readers to get to your website. If you get high-quality traffic you will have high sales and conversions. Not only that but if you have high-quality traffic it will improve your search engine rankings drastically. Your target audience is more likely to share the content on your website which in turn increase backlinks to your website. Below are a few tips that will help new travel affiliate marketers in increasing organic traffic to their website.
How can you drive traffic to your website?
Provide high-quality content to the users.
If you want to drive high-quality traffic to your website then you to provide content that is of high quality. This very important because the high-quality content will make the users feel like you really know what you are talking about. When they observe this in your content there are more chances of them going ahead and taking your recommendations. Apart from that, it is a well-known fact that having good quality content will definitely improve your search engine rankings. In order to produce high-quality content you have to keep few things in your mind every time you write something. A travel blogger must understand the queries of an average user and have to answer them in their blogs. One can do this simply by searching the most popular questions related to a particular topic on search engines or social media. After finding out the important questions that your target audience asks try to answer each one of them in your blog.
After you have successfully answered their questions provide them with a link of a service or product that you promote. This is very important as the reader has just read the solution to their problem and looking for a service or product that can solve it. Providing them with a step that will help them in completing their tasks will increase your chances of making them purchase a certain item or service. This will help the users in taking the action immediately. Use data and give the users real-life examples to get them engaged. Once you start giving them real-life examples they will start relating to them more easily and will have higher chances of performing actions. But one has to always understand that creating high-quality content is a complicated process. The only thing you can do to make it simple is to create content based on the requirements of your readers.
Write guest posts on other blogs
Writing guest posts on other blogs is one of the best strategies to increase high-quality traffic to your website. Other than increasing your quality of traffic guest posts can also help you build an audience of your own. There are a few things you have to follow if you want to use guest posts to increase high-quality traffic to your website. The first thing you have to make sure when you are writing a guest post is that you are writing the post on a blog that similar target audience. This is important because when you write guest posts on blogs that contain a similar audience then it will increase your chances of getting the type of audience you want for your website. As an affiliate marketer, you should not hesitate to promote yourself on this type of blog just take care that you don’t go overboard with it. With that being said add links within your content to promote yourself. But keep in mind that the content you provide in the guest posts should reflect the work on your website. If you can do this then you can have high conversion rates for your guest posts each and every time.
Be active on social media platforms
No one has to tell you how powerful has social media has become a tool for promoting every type of product and service you know. Social media is a great source of reaching your targeted audience. In today’s world, social media are not just platforms for social interactions but have become search engines to know more about products, companies, services, and the quality of those services. If you don’t realize this then just look at Twitter, Instagram, or Pinterest. You have to understand how important these platforms are to promote your affiliate programs and products. There are a few things you have to keep in mind before focusing on social media promotions. When you decide to promote your products on social media just don’t start promoting products or services on every social media platform that exists. You must limit yourself to a few social media platforms that are important and popular among people.
One must narrow their focus on limited platforms to target their audience for getting positive results. Choose social media platforms that are apt for your industry. Because this is your niche you have to choose the platform that has your target audience as every platform has a specific type of audience. After choosing the social media platforms you must be consistent with your postings. This will help you grow a steady following among your target audience. Keep experimenting with the type of content and style of content you post. This will give an idea of what your audience is liking and help you improve upon that. But the most important thing one has to is they have to keep on posting consistently irrespective of the amount of audience they have. You have to keep posting even if the results are low only then you will be able to build a loyal set of followers
Optimize the links of your website
If you are an affiliate marketer then there is no need to tell you how important the links are for the kind of business you do. Optimization of links is very essential as it boosts the effectiveness of your website. Optimization of links include actions like shortening and cloaking of links. This will enable you in branding your links which will help them in sharing them easily on social media platforms. There are plugins that will help you perform this action.
Benefits of travel affiliate marketing
You will always be giving high quality offers to your audience.
True unlike many other affiliate programs travel affiliate services always provide good offers for their customers. There are many highly reputed brands in the travel industry that provide great offers on hotels, cruises, flights and other services. So as an affiliate marketer you never have to worry that you are promoting some cheap company that offers shady deals to its customers.
Payouts are pretty high
Travel affiliate programs have some of the highest payouts in affiliate marketing. While most companies may offer just 10% as commission people do not realize that it can be more than a few hundred dollars for every successful referral. So even if you have a handful of successful referrals every week you will still be earning thousands of dollars.
Lots of opportunities
Most of the travel affiliate marketing is focused on predominantly English speaking countries. This is because people tend to think that the citizens of these countries are likely to travel kore than other countries. Well, this may be true to some extent but you do know that people from other countries also travel. So if you can create and post content in other languages it will help you in gaining audiences that are exclusive to you.
Creating content is fun and easy
Believe it or not, but creating content for the travel audience is way more simple and easy than it seems to be. There are plenty of travel bloggers so there is no shortage of content for you. Apart from that most of the travel affiliate marketing is driven by visual so you have to do less writing but keep it effective.
Now that you have an understanding of how to travel affiliate marketing works, how to drive traffic to your travel affiliate website, and the benefits of using travel lets enter into the main topic. Below is a list of best travel affiliate programs that are great for affiliate marketers.
Amazon Associates Affiliate Program
The first entry on this list of best travel affiliate programs is Amazon Associates. Amazon Associates is not your typical travel affiliate program as it has products other than the ones related to travel. But having said that it is one of the largest e-commerce websites that sell products that are related to travel. In fact, it is Amazon which has popularized the whole idea of affiliate marketing all around the world. Just like any other affiliate program Amazon Associates allows its affiliates to earn money by referring to products that they sell. If you are an affiliate marketer then you will definitely know about Amazon Associates as it is one of the best and most popular affiliate programs that is available in the market. But what makes Amazon different from other affiliate programs is its difficulty in getting approved. This is mainly because Amazon doesn’t want affiliates who have less traffic. So if you are new to affiliate marketing and have a brand new site then Amazon is not going to approve you to be their affiliate.
But if you have a site with small but high-quality traffic you can still get approved by Amazon Associates to be their affiliate. You can get easily approved if you follow the terms of service of Amazon. Once they approve you to be their affiliates there are some things that you must do. For instance, an affiliate must make at least a single sale for every 90 days. With hundreds and thousands of travel accessories getting purchased every day this is not a difficult task to accomplish. One of the great things about Amazon Associates is how straightforward the approval process is. If you request them for approval you will be notified within 24 hours. As an affiliate marketer, you are not going to market hotels or travel deals on Amazon Associates. All you can market on Amazon Associates is products like clothing, accessories related to travel, travel gear which are great things to promote. The commission structure of Amazon doesn’t depend on the product but the category to which the product belongs to. This means that if you promote suitcases the commission will be different from what you will get if you promote clothes. So if you are promoting things like luggage and handbags you will get 7% of the commission. If you promote products related to things like hiking then you will earn a 5.5% commission. The cookies by Amazon Associates last for only 24 hours which is very less.
Visit website: Amazon Associates
TripAdvisor Affiliate Program
Another great travel affiliate program for affiliate marketers is the affiliate program of TripAdvisor. TripAdvisor is one of the best travel affiliate programs if you are looking to promote deals on hotels, restaurants, flights, and other similar stuff in travel destinations. In fact, TripAdvisor is one of the best places to go to if you want to find the best deals on travel destinations. One of the most notable things about TripAdvisor is that it combines more than two hundred different booking websites into a single website. This is a great thing because people don’t have to go through several websites to get the best deals on hotels, restaurants, or flights. TripAdvisor is one of the most reputed, used, and trusted websites to save money on travel destinations around the world. As an affiliate marketer, these kinds of websites make your job even easier because you are referring to a travel site that is well known and gained the trust of many people.
Most of the sites the travel related are quite similar to each other. Because all of them have their own sites which they use to sell flight tickets, hotel bookings and other products that are related to travel. But TripAdvisor is completely different from all of them because this is not a site that sells flight tickets or hotel bookings. Instead, it is a website that can search for different travel-related websites and let you compare the deals so that you can choose the best deal. There are many reputed and popular sites in TripAdvisor like Agoda, Booking.com, and many more. This is great for affiliates to promote because you are not giving a single deal to your readers but a choice to choose from all the deals that are available on their website. This is a site that doesn’t care about what deal is being offered instead it hosts every company that offers a deal to the customers. The commission rate of TripAdvisor is also great. It offers a 50% commission for each successful referral. But you will get different amounts each time as the agreement with each partner is different. Even the cookie duration is not bad as each cookie lasts for 14 days.
Booking.com Affiliate Program
The next travel affiliate program on this list is the affiliate program of Booking.com. Booking.com’s affiliate program has to be the list of travel affiliate programs of an affiliate marketer who wants to promote travel sites. It is one of the most popular sites used by people all around the world to make their travel experience easy. Booking.com is a website that has thousands of hotels, travel agencies, flight companies, and more as its partners. You can book literally all types of travel-related activities. If you want to backpack across Europe or something else you can just go to Booking.com book hotels in no time. If you are a young entrepreneur who has just launched his travel company then the affiliate program of Booking.com will help you in a great way. Unlike many websites, Booking.com not only allows its users to book hotels and flights but it also allows them to book all kinds of land transportation.
Booking.com enables its user’s to choose from hundreds of thousands of hotels that are all across the world. The best part about all of this is all these bookings are of affordable rates. Not only hotels but people are also provided with options to choose rental houses, apartments, etc. Another great feature of Booking.com is it makes booking of flights very easy. Just like TripAdvisor it takes all of the flight booking websites and combines them into one. When you search for airline tickets on Booking.com it will combine all of them together to show the tickets that are at affordable rates. Booking.com provides its customers with the best options to book rental cars. It has partnered with a company called rentalcars.com to offer you this option. Not only that but you can also book an airport taxi using Booking.com.
The best part about all of this is you can bundle all of your bookings into one package. Booking.com offers you a part of the commission that it receives when a person books a hotel. An affiliate is only paid after the person completes the stay in that hotel. The commission rate differs with the lowest being 25%. But if you get more than 501 bookings every month you will get 40%. The cookie duration of Booking.com is 30 days.
World Nomads Travel affiliate program
The next affiliate program is quite different from all of the previous travel affiliate programs. It is the affiliate program of World Nomads. It is different from your typical travel affiliate program because it does not offer hotel bookings or flight ticket bookings. World Nomads offers travel insurance for its customers. If you want to promote travel insurance then World Nomads has one of the best travel affiliate programs. As soon as people hear the term travel insurance they start rolling their eyes. This is because they do not understand the importance of travel insurance. There are lots of benefits of travel insurance. For instance, it will help you in getting emergency medical assistance if you are overseas. All the expenses in the hospital regarding your treatment will be covered by travel insurance. If you get sick and want to go home but do not have money travel insurance takes care of all of those costs.
Even if a person loses his credit card or if it gets stolen their losses will be reimbursed by this insurance. As an affiliate marketer, you can write an engaging blog stating all the benefits of travel insurance. This will be a great way for you to promote World Nomads. World Nomads helps its affiliates to make sales through their step guides. World Nomads managers are always available to help you with the optimization and sales of your website. This company has been around for two decades and offers travel insurance in 140 countries which is a big deal. This will help you a lot in promoting World Nomads. World Nomads offers 10% commission to its affiliates for each successful referral and the cookies last for 60 days.
Skyscanner Affiliate Program
You cannot leave out Skyscanner’s affiliate program when you are talking about Travel affiliate programs. This is because Skyscanner is one of the most popular websites when it comes to booking hotels, flight tickets, and hiring cars. Skyscanner gets 50 million users every month, by this, you can understand how popular and useful this website is for travelers. This makes it very easy for affiliates to promote the products on this website to earn money. Skyscanner has been running successfully for the last eight years and it is still going strong. It has more than 1700 publishers who promote it. This is a great brand to promote if you have a good website that has high-quality traffic.
The best part about being an affiliate for Skyscanner is it offers some of the best tools used for affiliate marketing. Skyscanner offers its affiliates to use travel widgets, API, and White labels. If an affiliate wants to make use of travel widgets then they can easily add play widgets and plug to their website. The affiliates who are unable to use complicated affiliate marketing tools can use these tools as it is very easy to use. Travel API is for those people who are looking forward to building their own search capability. White label is for people who want to use customizable tools. Skyscanner offers 50% commission every successful referral when people book cars or flights. The cookies of Skyscanner last for 30 days.
Agoda Affiliate Program
Agoda is one of the most important travel affiliate programs on this list. This is because it is one of the fastest-growing hotel booking websites in the market. Even though it has its main offices in Asia it is becoming more and more popular in Europe, America, and the Middle East. This affiliate program is a great way for people to earn money by helping people to choose their travel destinations. Promoting the products of Agoda is very easy for affiliate marketers. This is because the ads on this website are completely customizable. The platform allows its affiliates to make ads that are extremely customizable. It also allows you to create search boxes for your websites to show the best accommodations in each city. Agoda is by far one of the most popular travel affiliate programs in the market.
Agoda affiliate program will its affiliates to create specific links for specific hotels. It will allow you to create hyperlinks to hotels. When you are creating text links you should already keep in mind what hotel you are going to promote. This text will not only have the hotel you want to promote but also all the nearby hotels. The Agoda affiliate program also allows you to create image links. The tool which allows you to create an image link will help you search for specific hotels and all their images. When you click on the photo it will give its HTML code which you can add to your website. The image of the hotel will be added to your website. When a user clicks on the image it will take them to the page of that hotel. Apart from these Agoda also allows you to use banners. Agoda offers decent commissions to its customers the lowest percentage being 35% that is for people who have less than 50 referrals. But if you refer over 1000 bookings then you will get 60% of the commission. However, the cookie duration of Agoda is just one day.
Expedia Affiliate Program
If you already did not know Expedia is one of the best travel affiliate programs out there. This website allows its users to search for deals related to hotels, flight tickets, vacations, and more. Expedia website is a part of a US-based technology company for travel called Expedia Group. Most of the website websites related to the Expedia Group act as search engines for aggregators of travel fare. Apart from Expedia.com the Expedia Group also owns notable websites like Hotels.com, Trivago, Cheap tickets, CarRentals.com, Traveldoo.com, SilverRail, Classic Vacations, Veneer.com, Orbitz, HomeAway, and Travelocity. An affiliate can use the brand of Expedia by featuring its links on their websites for promotion, sales, and inventory.
The best thing about Expedia is it is the one that negotiates with the suppliers to make sure that they deliver all the things they are promising to their customers. If you are an affiliate of Expedia you can easily connect with the millennials of the 21st century. Anyone can connect to Expedia using any of their devices instantly. If you become an affiliate of Expedia you can basically promote bookings of flights, hotels, cars, cruises, things to do, deals, rewards, rentals, collections, and others. Usually, Expedia offers a 5% commission on every successful referral but if you collect the inventory then you can earn 50% commission.
Lonely Planet Affiliate Program
The next affiliate program on this list of best travel affiliate programs is Lonely Planet Affiliate Program. An affiliate can earn a good income by promoting Lonely Planet because it is one of the leading travel media companies in the world. This is not a website or service that offers people deals on hotels or flight tickets. Lonely Planet is a website that allows travelers to have a great experience with places they visit by providing them with guides that will give them detailed information about the places they visit. It is an award-winning website that provides travel guides to almost every travel destination in the world. It all started the travel guide overland odyssey from London to Australia by the co-founders Maureen and Tony Wheeler. This adventure made them publish their first travel guidebook Across Asia on The cheap and then they found Lonely Planet.
If you are an affiliate of Lonely Planet then you can link your website to Lonely Planet in a number of ways. An affiliate earns commission every time a user purchases an ebook or printed travel guide or if they generate a click to one of the travel sites they are partnered with. All the leads generated by your website are monitored by Lonely Planet using their website. They check these leads and pay you a fixed percentage for every sale that is made through your affiliate link. Lonely Planet pays its affiliates 15% for each successful referral. The cookies of Lonely Planet last for 30 days.
Airbnb Affiliate Program
The next travel affiliate program on this list is not only one of the best affiliate programs but also one of the most complex affiliate programs. When you think of an affiliate program of a website you assume that there is only one affiliate program. But that is not the case when it comes to Airbnb it has three affiliate programs. The first one is the Airbnb referral program, the second one is the Airbnb affiliate program, and the latest one Airbnb associates program. The Airbnb affiliate program is a formal affiliate program and the referral program is an informal program that is for your friends and family. According to the referral program the users of Airbnb can earn travel credits if a friend clicks on your referred links and completes a reservation as a guest or a host. This is not for affiliates but non-affiliates to earn some travel rewards.
The affiliate program is for affiliates to earn money by promoting Airbnb. While there are not many details available about the affiliate program it is known that it pays money for every successful referral made by an affiliate. The links of Airbnb are very easy to share and get credit points. An affiliate earns a 30% commission for each referral. The cookie duration of Airbnb is 28 days.
ShareASale Affiliate Program
The last entry on this list of best travel affiliate programs is the affiliate program of ShareASale. ShareASale is not only a popular travel affiliate program but it is also even more popular as an affiliate program in general. This is a company that has more than two decades of experience in advertising and sales. It is easily one of the most popular and reputed affiliate programs that are present in the current market. One of the best things about ShareASale is it is absolutely free for you to sign up. Affiliates of ShareASale have access to more than 4800 merchants who are from various niche industries and markets. All of them are not related to the travel industry. But there are many merchants that are in ShareASale who belong to the travel industry. This will give the affiliates a great opportunity to earn some cash by promoting travel products present on this website.
To sign up for ShareASale all you have to do is first create a username and password then move on to the next step. In the next step, you have to give details regarding your website, its URL, and the primary language. One can only use ShareASale only if they have an active website. After this, you have to enter the address and payment. ShareASale does not offer payments to people through PayPal but gives them physical checks then you have to wait for 2 to 3 days for approval. ShareASale is great affiliates because it pays them in two ways that are pay per lead and the other one is pay per sale. An affiliate has to select the travel merchants in order to get the referral links and banners through their account. After this, they can promote these products and earn commissions on them. ShareASale offers a 20% commission to its affiliates for each successful referral.
Conclusion
Just like any other affiliate programs travel affiliate programs have their own market. But in order to tap into that market, an affiliate must have an understanding of travel. They must know what are all the things that people want to know about when they read a travel blog. An affiliate must understand what are all the products that are loved by the travelers and talk about them. Every post they make must answer the queries of the audience related to that particular topic. High-quality content is very essential in order to drive good traffic to your website. Affiliates have to be active on social media and optimize their websites and links in order to generate more traffic. Travel affiliate programs offer very good commissions contrary to popular belief. There are many things you can promote that are related to the travel industry. You can promote clothing, travel gear, travel accessories, guides, travel insurance, or the best deals on hotels, flight tickets, cruises, car rentals, and many more. If you want to promote travel-related products choose the products that you understand the best and earn great commissions. Hope this article has helped in travel affiliate programs and choose the one suitable for you.
