Welcome to our travel blog income report for the first quarter of 2026.
In this post, we want to share our travel blog income from the last three months with you. The first quarter of the year is usually the slowest, and it wasn’t the greatest for us. But it wasn’t completely bad, either, and things are going to look up once we move into spring and summer.
So keep reading if you want to find out how much we made, how much we spent on expenses, and how much time we spent working on the blog.
Why an income report?
If you’ve been browsing through our blog archives, you might have seen income reports from 2022 (check out Q2, Q3 and Q4). They’re fun to make, but unfortunately, they’re also a lot of work.
I enjoyed doing these reports and was planning on doing one for Q1 2023, but then we got busy and were delayed.
And then the Helpful Content Update happened.
If you’ve never heard of this, the Helpful Content Update, also called HCU, was an update to the Google algorithm. That algorithm decides which sites get shown when you search on Google. And the update completely tanked our traffic.
It’s normal that rankings go up and down when Google tweaks its algorithm. But the HCU was a disaster for many bloggers, us included. Over the course of a few weeks, our traffic and income almost completely disappeared.
We updated some posts at first, but in the end, we decided to take a break from blogging. This blog is a side income for us, and as we had a lot of stuff going on in life, the blog had to take a backseat.
We didn’t do much in 2024 or the first half of 2025. But then, we received an email from Booking.com, telling us that they were about to kick us out of their affiliate program and that all of our links were going to be invalid.
While we didn’t have much income in 2024, it was enough to cover our expenses, and we didn’t want to lose that. Travelpayouts, fortunately, has a system that allows you to switch all of your Booking.com links automatically over to their system, but it prompted us to start updating old blog posts to manually swap the links.
I don’t know if it was because we worked on the blog again or if Google re-tweaked its algorithm, but we suddenly saw an uptick in traffic. Finally, things were looking up.
We have worked a lot on the blog in the past months. We have published posts, updated old posts and taken a few trips that we’re very excited to write about. And with all that energy to write posts, I want to go back to regularly sharing income reports.
Take these as a lesson in what it is like to recover from a huge drop in rankings after a Google update. We hope you find these interesting.
Our traffic in Q1 2026
From the first of January 2026, until the 31st of March 2026, we had a total of 87,982 page views and 63,631 active users.
As you can see from the curve, we didn’t really see any growth. On the contrary, we even saw a dip in March.
Winter is always slow for us, as we cover a lot of European destinations. Those are not primary places where you would travel in winter. We do have content about Latin America and Asia, but many of the posts are either not ranking well or are niche posts that don’t attract a lot of traffic.
Take our post about the Quebrada de Humahuaca, for example. If you enter “things to do in Quebrada de Humahuaca”, you will find us on the first page. The issue is that not many people travel there, so not many people are searching for this term.
Side note: if you’re ever in northwestern Argentina, though, you should totally go there.
We also think we might have been impacted by some tweaks to the Google algorithm. Most of our traffic comes from our posts about traditional food around the world. Some of those are still doing great, but others saw a dip in traffic.
Here is a breakdown by month:
| January 2026 | February 2026 | March 2026 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Active users | 22,358 | 20,382 | 21,240 |
| Pageviews | 30,469 | 28,439 | 29,074 |
While Q1 wasn’t bad overall, we didn’t see any growth compared to Q4/2025. I think some of it might be due to a Google update, but some of it is our content. We have a lot of posts about Christmas markets, which tend to peak in November and December.
That traffic drops steeply in January.
Let’s see how it goes in the second quarter. We’ll report back here, so stay tuned.
Our travel blog income in Q1 2026
Traffic is all good and well, but in the end, income is what matters. It’s what covers our expenses and what allows us to travel to then write about more destinations.
We have two different sources of income. The first one is affiliate income.
You might have seen our affiliate disclosure at the top. Whenever someone clicks one of our links and makes a booking or purchase, we get a small commission.
The second source of income is the ads that you can see on our website.
We joined Journey by Mediavine towards the end of last year and are now getting a steady stream of income from ads. Let’s break it down for you.
Affiliate income
Travelpayouts
Almost all of our affiliate income comes from Travelpayouts. Remember when I mentioned that Booking.com booted us out of their direct program? We switched all of our links over to Travelpayouts and have been getting paid through them.
The issue with affiliate income is that you only get your money once someone completes their trip. That means that if someone books a hotel in January for a trip in August, we need to wait until at least August to know if that trip took place or if it got cancelled.
In reality, there’s even more delay. Some companies take a few weeks to report back on the status of a booking. That means that the August hotel booking might only get shown as complete in September or October.
Since that makes income volatile and complicated, we only report the income that we actually got.
In Q1 2026, that was 204.10€ ($239.51).
All of that income came through bookings from Booking.com. Last year, we had a few from Busbud and Viator as well, but for the first quarter of this year, the only confirmed ones are for hotels.
Amazon
If you’ve looked at our income report from Q4/2022, you can see that we used to get some money from Amazon.
That has definitely changed.
We still include links to Amazon in some of our posts, but it’s not a focus for us. We barely make any sales there, so our income was relatively low.
In Q1/2026, we made 12.58€ ($14.76).
Get Your Guide
Get Your Guide is a great platform that we use ourselves for booking tours.
The affiliate program used to make us consistent money. Unfortunately, that income stream has dropped quite a bit.
We still get clicks on our links to tours that we recommend. But if the reader has the Get Your Guide app installed and books through there, we don’t get any commission. Those referrals don’t count according to the conditions of the affiliate program.
And unfortunately, Get Your Guide has been massively pushing their app, so more and more people have it. This is why many bloggers are now switching over to Viator, where you can often find the exact same tours.
In Q1/2026, we made 74.14€ ($87.00).
Booking.com
I know I said that we’re not using the Booking.com direct affiliate program anymore. From time to time, though, we still get a little bit of money. That’s for bookings that were completed after we left their program. It’s not much, and we only got one payment in January, which I assume is the last one we ever got from them.
In Q1/2026, we made 8.49€ ($9.96).
Advertisement income
As I mentioned above, we are now part of the Journey by Mediavine ad network and get regular payments to our account.
The payments are delayed a bit, so the money we earned in January has only just made it into our account now in April. That’s how the conditions of this program work. Fortunately, we can already see in our dashboard how much we earned in the past three months.
- January 2026: $170.21 (144.40€)
- February 2026: $202.23 (172.33€)
- March 2026: $183.81 (156.63€)
In total, in Q1/2026, we made $556.25 (473.36€).
Total travel blog income in Q1 2026
So how much did we earn in the first three months of 2026?
Here is a breakdown by source. Almost all of the Booking.com income came through Travelpayouts, with only a small fraction paid by Booking.com directly.
Our travel blog expenses in Q1 2026
As travel bloggers, we always have expenses. Running a blog isn’t free, and while it isn’t extremely expensive either, we need to pay for hosting and a few tools that we use.
All of our expenses in Q1/2026 were recurring expenses. We don’t pay for them monthly, instead, most are on a yearly plan (with the exception of hosting, where we prepaid for a longer period of time). But for the purpose of this report, we split up those yearly plans into monthly expenses.
Here’s how much we spent:
Hosting & Domain: 37.85€ ($44.42)
We use SiteGround for hosting our blog. That’s also where we bought the domain name and pay for it every year.
SiteGround works well for us, and we’re very happy with them.
Keysearch: 25.04€ ($29.38)
Keysearch is our keyword research tool. We use it extensively to find out which keywords are worth writing about and which ones are too difficult.
If we wrote about the best things to do in Istanbul, for example, we would only have a low chance of showing up on the first page of Google. It’s a very competitive keyword that a lot of people have written about. Something more niche, like visiting Istanbul in winter, is much easier to rank for.
We get this information from Keysearch, including also the search volume so we know not to write about topics that nobody’s interested in.
Tailwind: 39.83€ ($46.74)
Tailwind is a tool for scheduling pins on Pinterest.
We don’t use it much at the moment, and it’s a significant expense for a tool we barely use. We’re on a legacy plan, though, and we want to preserve it. If we cancel and then come back, we’d get much worse conditions. That’s why we’re keeping this at the moment.
Grammarly: 29.55€ ($34.68)
Grammarly is a spell-checking tool that also helps correct grammar and style issues. We use Grammarly to check all of our posts, and it’s been very helpful.
Total expenses for Q1 2026: 132.27€ ($155.22)
Our revenue in Q1 2026
It’s time to do the maths and add everything together.
In total, we got 772.67€ in income and had 132.27€ in expenses.
That means that we earned 640.40€ in Q1 2026.
If you compare that to our income in 2022, it’s far below what we earned back then. We’re definitely not back to where we were before all those Google updates. It’s not all bad news, though. We are slowly recovering.
Plus, comparing the last quarter of 2022 with the first one of 2026 is an unfair comparison. Income always drops in the first quarter of the year, since fewer people travel and book trips. I’m positive that it’ll go up in the next few months.
What’s coming next?
We have already taken some exciting trips this year, to Moldova and Istanbul. We have also visited Daniel’s parents in Spain and started writing about the cool places near Madrid that we’ve visited. And we are, of course, already planning exciting new adventures for this year!
Besides having a few posts that we’re going to publish soon, we’re also working on updating old content. We want you to find the best possible information on our blog, so we’re going through our old posts and making sure that everything is up to date.
We hope you found this income report useful. If you have your own blog, remember to sign up for Travelpayouts, as it’s one of the easiest platforms to earn money through. It connects you with plenty of brands and is very simple to set up.
While you’re here, check out some content from our recent trips and get inspired for your next adventure:
- The historic Strawberry Train takes passengers from Madrid to the Royal Palace of Aranjuez
- Discover the best Turkish food you need to try
- Visiting Germany? The Wuppertal suspension monorail is one of the longest suspension railways in the world
Until your next adventure!
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