If you love to Travel, you can be earning from your travels through these top 8 best travel Affiliate programs. You could be making commissions from encouraging your coworkers, friends or family to book their trips through your assigned affiliate links.
Turn your blog into a travel blog with recent trips you took with friends, family or work-related. Implement the travel affiliate programs into your blog article content. For instance, you work for a medium to a large company that takes several business trips a year, you can ask them to book their travel through you by directing them to your website blog.
Another blogging tip for making money this way is had your friends, family and coworkers take pictures of their trip and get permission to use those pictures on your blog then link to your affiliate link recommending others to book their travel.
This list compiled below is companies associated with traveling and have an affiliate program for you to join as their partner.
Top 8 Best Travel Affiliate Programs
Lonely Planet
Lonely Planet is a big travel guidebook publisher around the world that publishes travel guides, magazines, books and more. You can also book your travel trip with flights and hotels they pay commission payouts to all their affiliate promoters.
You can earn up to 15% commission on printed and digital books. For travel guides, you will earn 12% commissions. Commissions are paid out once a month through PayPal.
When you join Lonely Planet as their affiliate, you will get access to their banner ads that you can upload to your website for visitors to click on. They offer a 30-day cookie duration that means even if your customer buys after 29 days of clicking on your affiliate link you will still earn that commission. They use Commission Junction Network to manage their affiliate program for the Asia Pacific area, Awin for UK and Americas.
STA Travel
STA Travel is a global leader providing students to travel with more than 35 years of providing travel experiences to their customers. They believe traveling is the best educational experience. STA Travel has more than 350 stores in more than 75 countries with excellent flight deals for everyone and exclusive airfare discounts for students and travelers under the age of 30.
You can earn 10% commissions on tours with every successful transaction, four dollars per flight and 10% on ISIC & SIM cards. The payout is once a month through PayPal. STA Travel uses the Commission Junction affiliate network to manage its affiliate program.
TripAdvisor
TripAdvisor is very well-known for travel and restaurant bookings worldwide and used by millions. As an affiliate with Trip Advisor you can earn up 80% commission on each successful transaction through your affiliate link. The standard affiliate commission is 50%. The amount you earn is based on the type of travel service you promote on your website. TripAdvisor is leading company with the travel industry providing commission payout and very popular with travel bloggers all around the world to make money by offering travel services.
TripAdvisor uses Commission Junction to manage their affiliate program. Commissions are paid out once a month through PayPal.
You can use the search bar below to search for even more travel related affiliate programs that are not listed here.
Agoda
Agoda is another trusted travel community in the world that this used by millions worldwide. As Agoda affiliate you will earn 5% commission on each successful transaction you direct to their website through your affiliate link whether it is resort accommodation or hotel booking. This means each $200 booking at the commission rate of 5 % will earn you $10 commission. The commissions are paid out once a month on 1st day of month and paid out through your PayPal account. The minimum payment threshold is $200, if threshold does not meet within the month your commissions are carried over to the next month until you reach the minimum payout.
Agoda has great marketing tools to help you monetize your travel blog with Hotel Data file, text links, search box and banners.
The more bookings you have the higher commission tier. For instance, less than 50 bookings earn 4% commission, 50 to 99 bookings earn 4.5%, 100 to 199 bookings earn 5% commission, 200 to 999 bookings earn 6% commissions, and with more than 999 bookings you will earn 7% commissions.
Cruise Direct
The name says it all with Cruise Direct that pays hefty commissions per sale on cruise vacations. As affiliate with cruise direct you will earn 3% commission on each sale and has 45-day cookie duration to help you earn even more commissions from your website affiliate link recommendations.
The approval time for cruise direct is usually within 24 business hours and they will contact you by email letting you know if approved. The commissions are paid once a month with a minimum payment threshold of $25 and paid out through PayPal.
As their affiliate Cruise Direct will send you frequent deals and bonus commissions to their active promoters through newsletter so therefore make sure you are subscribed to their newsletter.
You will have access to their promotion tools that include banner ads, text ads, search boxes along with personalized landing pages to help boost your conversions. Cruise Direct uses Commission Junction affiliate network to help manage their affiliate program.
Booking.com
Booking.com you have heard about and is well recognized platform for reserving accommodations worldwide online. Millions of people use this service to book their hotels and accommodations online so you will have very good chances of earning huge commissions through their affiliate program.
You will earn 25% commission on each successful booking generated through your affiliate links and the longer they stay the more commissions you will earn. Which means you might would like to recommend hotel booking longer than one night, especially during weekend when rates are higher. You can earn up to 40% commission depending on the amount of bookings you make each month.
Over a 1,550,000 rooms are booked with booking.com in one day worldwide giving you even better chance to earn huge commissions by promoting hotels and accommodations through your booking.com affiliate links. To help you be successful they provide excellent promotional material banner ads, search box, deal finder, WordPress plugin and many more tools to promote their services.
Hotels Combined
Hotels Combined is the biggest platform for hotel comparison where thousands of people who are traveling around the world use it to book their stay and pays commissions to their affiliate partners.
You will earn between 0.50 cent to $2 for every lead that you send to their website. Each referral that click on your affiliate links will be tracked up to 365 days, making it where you continue earning from each referral for a year. There are only a few affiliate programs that allow you to earn commissions this long for a solid year, do not pass this opportunity up.
Commissions are paid out once a month and most of the time at end of month. The payouts are paid after minimum threshold of $100 is meet by PayPal.
Expedia
Expedia is one well known big travel affiliate network that has access to over 500,000 hotels worldwide that you can use in recommending travel bookings. The commissions rates are based on the type of transactions and they range from 3% to 11% per transaction. Here are some of the commission rates for some of the packages:
- Vacation Packages: Flight plus hotel, fight plus hotel and car rental with 3 hotel nights 5% on each sale.
- Vacation Packages: flight plus hotel, flight plus hotel and car rental with less than 3 hotel night stay 3% on each sale.
- Expedia Premium Plus Hotel: 11% on each sale based on monthly merchant hotel sales
- Premium hotel sales: 9% on each sale
- Rental car sales: 6% on each sale
- Activities sales: 10% per sale
- Basic hotel sales: 3% per sale.
The minimum payout threshold is $50 and is paid once a month usually around the 15th of the month.
Additional Tips to Be Successful Travel Blogger
1. Proper Training: Get the proper training on how to monetize your affiliate links to make your blog count and get more readers. I recommend Wealthy Affiliate training, as the training covers everything from building your website, getting traffic and getting that first sale.
2. Use white label travel affiliate programs: This is unbranded travel related products or services that allow you to brand with your own company name. The unbranded products will allow you to set your own prices therefore increasing your profits and create brand awareness to your website. Here are some unbranded travel companies to get you started Travel Payouts, Flight Less, Cheap Flights, and UpBooking
More Related Sources
“Best Camping Affiliate Programs”
“Best Affiliate Programs for All Marketers”
“Best Google AdSense Alternatives 2020”
“Top 5 Online Affiliate Networks”
“Software Niche Ideas”
Final Words
Making money from your own travel website or blog is not hard at all and there are many travel affiliate websites that you can use to make a substantial amount of commissions. There is one drawback, you cannot trust every travel affiliate program you come across and will need to research each one to weed out the bad ones. Therefore, I have carefully researched each travel affiliate program listed above to make sure they are truly genuine, free to signup and offer you great commissions.
What are your thoughts about monetizing your website with these travel affiliate programs mentioned above? Share your opinions and thoughts below. You can also follow me on twitter.
