This post is sponsored by Travelpayouts.
If you’ve been following us for a while, you’ve seen our income reports. In our latest income report, you will see that almost all of our affiliate income comes from Travelpayouts. This is a large difference from older reports, where we earned affiliate income from a lot of different sources.
So what changed? Why are we doing things differently now? And should you sign up for Travelpayouts?
In this post, we will walk you through what Travelpayouts does, why we are using it, and the pros and cons. Quick disclaimer, this is a sponsored post. It is also an honest review of Travelpayouts, and all of the opinions we mention are our own. We’ll talk about the pros and cons and about some of the tools we use. We’ll also go into Drive and why we are still conflicted about using it.
And we’ll give you information on how to sign up for Travelpayouts and get a bonus of up to $100 when you use our referral link.
What is Travelpayouts?
Travelpayouts is a platform for affiliate marketing.
Quick overview of affiliate marketing
This is a review of Travelpayouts, so we can’t go into much detail on affiliate marketing. It’s a whole topic in its own right, with lots of resources available online. Let’s focus on a quick overview.
There are multiple ways you can do affiliate marketing. We almost exclusively insert links into our blog posts. If we like a hotel or a tour, we’ll insert a link and recommend it. There are more ways to do affiliate marketing, via email or social media, for example. We don’t use those at the moment, though we wouldn’t discard inserting affiliate links into our email newsletter in the future.
Second, there are lots of different platforms for affiliate marketing. You can work directly with a company. We use this for Amazon and Directferries, for example. This means that we signed up directly with the company.
The other option is to go through a platform that offers access to many different brands and companies.
When we started our blog, everyone was talking about CJ and Skimlinks, so we signed up for both. Those platforms have access to hundreds of brands, which means we didn’t have to sign up with them individually. Unfortunately, they were not travel-focused, so most of the programs there were not relevant for us.
So what is Travelpayouts?
Travelpayouts is an affiliate platform that focuses exclusively on travel affiliates. It’s much smaller than CJ or Skimlinks, but the available programs are all travel-related. That’s great because you don’t have to scroll past skin care and tire brands to find what you’re looking for.
Travelpayouts focuses on travel bloggers, so they know exactly what bloggers need and what they are interested in. An affiliate program like Amazon works with big websites and huge companies that we can’t compete with. Travelpayouts, on the other hand, is focused on bloggers. That means they are interested in you, their support staff understands how travel blogs work, and they listen to your feedback on what to improve.
Brands available on Travelpayouts
I don’t want to give you a long list of all of the brands available on Travelpayouts. They fall into a few large categories:
- Accommodation
- Transport
- Tours and activities
- Insurances
- Travel SIM cards and others
Within the transport category, you have lots of options for flights, trains, buses, rental cars, bikes, and more.
We most often use Booking.com for hotel recommendations, as it’s the booking platform we also use ourselves when travelling. Besides that, we use the Viator affiliate program frequently, and we also sometimes include links to Aviasales or Airalo in our blog posts. We also like the Discovercars program, as it’s a great website to compare rental car rates.
There are lots of other options. We have used Omio for bus and train tickets, Tiqets for entrance tickets, and so on. Our biggest success is with Booking.com and Viator, but which brands work well for you might be different from what works for us.
One of the big brands available on Travelpayouts is Get Your Guide. We actually book a lot of tours with them, but we have never used them on Travelpayouts. By the time we joined, we were already in the direct affiliate program. While we could easily switch over our links, we are focusing more on Viator anyway, so it’s not worth the effort for us.
Travelpayouts tools
Travelpayouts has a couple of tools available for creating affiliate income.
Links and Widgets
The easiest tool is the one we use the most. It’s the one for creating links. You put in any link, for example, to a specific hotel or activity, and turn it into an affiliate link. You can even add a tracking ID, which we use to keep track of which posts convert into bookings.
You also have the option of creating widgets. I don’t like them because I find they don’t convert at all. They look too similar to advertisements, so readers don’t click on them. I often feel that the only ones benefiting from them are the companies that provide the widgets. It’s free advertising for them and creates brand awareness, but it doesn’t convert into income for bloggers.
That’s probably why many companies are trying to push those widgets.
Drive
Drive is the newest tool in Travelpayouts that everyone is talking about. At its core, it’s a feature that provides multiple tools that you can use as you wish. Let’s go into more detail on each of them, so you can better understand how you could use them.
Link Switcher
The Link Switcher tool is a lifesaver. We got kicked out of the Booking.com direct affiliate program with very little notice, and definitely not enough time to manually switch over all affiliate links.
Fortunately, Travelpayouts had a solution to help us. We turned on the Link Switcher, and all of our Booking.com links got converted to Travelpayouts affiliate ones.
Link Switcher allows you to choose which brands you want to switch over. I highly recommend turning it on, just in case you ever forget to turn a regular link into an affiliate link. It has happened to me, and this tool ensures that everything redirects correctly.
Link relevant keywords
This tool is one of the ones we don’t use. In theory, it’s great. It goes through your posts and checks for keywords, then inserts affiliate links when appropriate. That can lead to higher conversion rates, and I’m sure there are bloggers who are benefiting from it.
We are very deliberate about where we add affiliate links and what we link to. That means that every affiliate link is planned, and we don’t need to automatically turn keywords into links. In fact, we once switched it on and found the extra links more confusing than helpful.
But if you just signed up for Travelpayouts or have not used the keyword linking tool, we recommend giving it a try. It’s always good to experiment, see what it does to your website, and you can switch it off immediately if you don’t like it.
Insert recommendations
The recommendation tool is one we use on some but not all of our blog posts.
We have lots of posts on our blog that don’t have any affiliate links. We wrote most of those posts a long time ago, before we even joined the Booking.com affiliate program. While we updated some of them with recent information, we never got around to inserting hotel or tour recommendations.
That’s where the recommendation insertion tool comes in.
It analyses the post and inserts little boxes with recommendations, mostly for tours and hotels, but sometimes also for SIM cards, flights, or whatever else fits. From our experience, they are usually pretty well aligned with the content of the posts.
We have our own format for boxes that we use. In many of our most recent posts, we therefore disabled the recommendations. Fortunately, that’s very easy to set up in the Drive setting, and we could tell the tool which posts to ignore. I especially like the granular control here, so we can choose what works best for us.
Smart Previews
Have you ever gone to a website, hovered over a link, and seen a little box pop up with a preview of the link or more information? That’s smart previews.
This tool allows the user to see more about the hotel, tour, product, or other service that the affiliate link points to. It’s nice because by the time the reader clicks, they are already excited about what’s coming.
It can also be pretty annoying because it blocks some of the text and comes up when accidentally hovering over a link. And I found that it slows down the blog. I could never quite measure it, but it always felt subjectively slower to me. That might have just been the little boxes loading, and there’s a chance the overall page loading speed was not impacted at all.
We didn’t like this tool much, so after trying it for a while, we decided to disable it. I can see its use, but I don’t think it’s good for our audience.
Targeted Offers
Ah, targeted offers. Out of all of the tools that Travelpayouts and Drive offer, this is the one that I am the most conflicted about.
Targeted Offers opens a booking website in the background while the user reads the blog post. It says that it recognises when the reader is ready to make a booking, but I think that’s simply not true. I have visited many websites that had targeted offers enabled, and it always opens a new tab for me, usually after only a few seconds.
There are two affiliate websites offering this service, Travelpayouts and Stay22.
Both platforms go about it in a very different way, and I absolutely prefer Travelpayouts. The targeted offers are not very intrusive. I never had them pop up on mobile, and they only opened in the background. With Stay22, on the other hand, I often find that it opens my Booking.com app on my phone. That’s the worst kind of user experience, and it usually makes me leave a blog as I frantically hit the back button on my phone.
Travelpayouts’ targeted offers are better. As I said, they’re less intrusive, and they only open in the background on desktop. Nevertheless, they don’t make for the greatest user experience.
Unfortunately, they contribute to a large chunk of the bookings we get, so we are very hesitant to turn them off. For now, we are leaving them on. And if people are booking through them, then surely, they are not that bothered, are they?
The great thing about targeted offers is that they adapt the booking website to the reader. I always get Booking.com, but I know that it’s not the same for everyone. In incognito, I have had Trip.com pop up before, which is a website that gives us a lot of bookings. They’re often low value, but they add up. And clearly, we have a lot of users who like that website.
Targeted offers also include Expedia.com, which seems to be popular with some of our users. We don’t regularly use it, so we don’t link to Expedia, but it’s clearly used by many travellers.
So, as a summary, targeted offers are great for affiliate income, which we love. On the other hand, they make the user experience just a little bit worse. We still use that function because overall, it’s worth it for us.
Reports and content analytics
Putting up affiliate links and getting bookings is important. But what’s just as important is to monitor what works and what doesn’t.
That’s why we spend a lot of time looking at reports and the content analytics section.
The report I use most often is the bookings one. It lists all of the bookings in a specified time period, so I can see how many we had. For each booking, it shows which website it was booked through, the date of the booking and the update date, the booking value, and the status of the booking. For pending ones, it also shows the potential earnings, whereas for confirmed bookings, we see the actual earnings. That’s useful if we want to see where our income comes from.
Another important field is the SubID, which is either the tracking ID we specified when setting up the link or some other information on where the booking comes from (targeted offers, for example).
For each booking, we can click on the details, and a box opens with more information. That’s helpful for seeing what was booked (which hotel or tour, for example).
It also often includes the date of the booking (not the date on which it was made, but the date on which the tour takes place, for example). The ones for the upcoming week are most likely to go through, whereas there’s a high chance that a booking for half a year from now will get cancelled.
Unfortunately, there’s no option to filter by date of the tour or hotel stay. It’s in the free text field, but to access it, you need to look at each booking individually. That’s quite inconvenient. August, for example, is high season in Europe, and we tend to get lots of bookings for that month. We would love to know how many, exactly, and what our potential earnings are. Unfortunately, this information is not accessible at the moment.
Pros and cons of Travelpayouts
Pros of Travelpayouts
All affiliates in one place
The biggest advantage of Travelpayouts is that you have (almost) all affiliates you need in one place. We barely use other programs anymore, except for a few Directferries links and the Amazon one. But when it comes to travel bookings, we rely mostly on Travelpayouts. They have partners for almost everything we need.
Applying to programs is super easy. We don’t have to sign up on a billion different platforms. And we can easily create links for all of them in one place.
Payout time
Most platforms have a minimum amount of affiliate income you need to earn before it’s paid to your bank account. It depends on the payout method, but you usually need a substantial amount of bookings before seeing any money.
We have some programs from which we’ve only earned a few Euros so far. But fortunately, Travelpayouts looks at the combined income from all programs when paying out money. That makes it very easy to reach the minimum threshold.
Payout methods
Travelpayouts offers a variety of payout methods. You can get paid by bank transfer, either in US Dollars or Euros. For us, this is great news because it saves us currency conversion fees.
If that’s not an option for you, you can also choose PayPal or Webmoney. And depending on your region, there might be other methods available. I like the flexibility, because it means we can choose the payout method we like best.
Great customer service
Travelpayouts has great customer service. Remember above when we mentioned that they focus on travel bloggers? That means that as a blogger, you’re not just a random customer, you are their preferred customer.
They know what bloggers need and focus on improving their service for us. And they’re very helpful when you contact them with questions. You definitely don’t get that kind of service from a giant company like Booking.com or Amazon.
Bonus payments
From time to time, Travelpayouts might offer you bonus payments for trying out features or the chance to participate in giveaways.
When you sign up through our link, for example, you get up to $100 in bonuses. If you enable Drive, you get the following bonuses on top of your regular income:
- First $50 earned => $25 bonus
- First $100 earned => $25 bonus
- First $1000 earned => $50 bonus
And as we mentioned, Travelpayouts often has giveaways you can enter, and they’re always up for cooperation. Just send them a message with your proposal.
Cons of Travelpayouts
Reporting
We already mentioned above that some information is not available in the reports. In the direct Booking.com program, you could filter by all bookings made for an upcoming month and see their status. This function is not available in Travelpayouts. You can see when a booking was made and when it was updated, but the details are only available in a free-text field.
Some programs provide so little information that we’re not sure what was even booked. Trip.com is especially bad with information. I don’t think that’s Travelpayouts’ fault, I think it’s because the program doesn’t want to provide more details. Still, I wish some companies took the reporting more seriously because it’s helpful to optimise affiliate links.
Not all bookings count
This is not Travelpayouts’ fault, but it’s annoying as hell.
Some programs do not pay their affiliate partners for bookings made through their app. Get Your Guide, for example, is the worst one. They have pushed their app to the majority of their users, but if someone clicks on our links and gets redirected to the app, we don’t get any income.
It’s one of the reasons why many bloggers have seen their Get Your Guide income drop and why we’re slowly switching our links to Viator. Which also doesn’t pay for app bookings, but I feel as if more people still book through their website than through their app.
The conclusion is that you need to choose your partners carefully and optimise, so you get the best revenue possible.
Delayed reporting
Once again, this is not Travelpayouts’ fault but rather inherent to some of the programs. It can take a few weeks after a booking is completed for it to show as complete in the report and for us to get our money.
This depends on the terms and conditions of the individual program, but it means that there’s a rather long delay between the time a booking was made and the money appearing in our account. Booking.com is one of the worst, from what we’ve seen, with a waiting time of several weeks to receive confirmation that a booking is complete.
Travelpayouts Referral Program
Once you’ve signed up for Travelpayouts, you can refer other bloggers. Remember how above, we told you that if you use our link to sign up, you can get up to $100 in bonuses?
Well, once you’ve made an account on Travelpayouts, you can get your own referral link. For every person who signs up through your link and earns money, you get a bonus. Which is a great deal, as the new blogger signing up gets a bonus, and so do you.
We hope you now have a better idea of the advantages and disadvantages of Travelpayouts. The platform is not perfect, but we think it’s the best one that we have ever worked with. And we know we’ll keep using Travelpayouts in the future, because it’s so convenient to have all links in one place.
Plus, the customer service is awesome, and everyone is so nice.
If you aren’t using it yet, you don’t have anything to lose if you sign up now.
While you’re here, make sure to check out our latest income report to get a better understanding of how we earn money.
Until your next adventure!
