How To Grow Your Travel Blogging Income with Travelpayouts

If you want to increase your travel blogging income, one of the best ways to do so is through affiliate marketing. You get to promote products like guided tours, hotels, car rentals, and more in exchange for a commission on every sale. I started doing affiliate marketing in 2018 after learning about it through Nomadic Matt’s travel blogging course. That same year, I wrote a review for the course, added my affiliate link to it, and earned my first affiliate sale. This proved to me that I could actually make money from affiliate marketing. I was instantly hooked. After that, I gradually joined affiliate networks, including my absolute favorite, Travelpayouts.

As a travel blogger, you absolutely have to join Travelpayouts, the largest travel affiliate network in the world. This platform houses over 100 affiliate programs in the travel niche, from Booking.com to Get Your Guide. I’ve earned tens of thousands of dollars from affiliate marketing by promoting products and experiences I love. In this post, I will walk you through how to grow your income as a travel blogger using Travelpayouts.

What is affiliate marketing?

Before we jump into how to use Travelpayouts, I want to ensure we’re all up to speed on what affiliate marketing is and how it works. Affiliate marketing is promoting the products or services of other companies to earn a percentage of sales. An affiliate is someone who promotes other companies products or services. As an affiliate, you receive a unique affiliate link that you share to promote your affiliate products. Anytime someone purchases through your link, you earn a percentage of the sale or a flat fee, known as a commission.

Let’s say you love using Booking.com to book cheap hotels and run a budget travel blog. You can sign up for Booking.com’s affiliate program and get a unique link you’ll use to get people to book hotels through the platform. Every time makes a booking through your link; you earn a percentage of the sale. Affiliate commissions vary greatly, but I find that they typically range between 3%-40%.

How do affiliate links work?

Your affiliate link, or a referral link, is a specific URL created just for you. The link contains a unique code that tracks all the traffic you send to a company’s website. When a customer clicks your link, your affiliate ID is stored on a cookie on the customer’s browser. If that customer purchases through your link, the company traces that purchase back to your affiliate ID. Then you receive a payment via PayPal, direct deposit, or whatever payment method you’ve set up. 

Why do affiliate marketing as a travel blogger?

The travel niche is a perfect industry to net a profit via affiliate marketing, both offline and online. People love to travel and always want to learn about tools and resources to make travel easier. As a travel blogger, people see you as an authority, so they will likely follow your recommendations. For instance, offline affiliate marketing in the travel niche works when travel agents get a commission from booking package tours or tickets for their customers. At the same time, online travel affiliate marketing drives sales to a merchant’s website.

Dozens of affiliate programs are out there. For example, Booking.com and GetYourGuide, RentalCars, Tripadvisor, and other companies have an affiliate programs. You can join each of them through the Travelpayouts affiliate network, where more than 80 different affiliate programs are available. Using an affiliate network allows you to monetize tourist traffic more effectively. 

What is Travelpayouts?

Travelpayouts is the largest affiliate program focused on traveling, with almost 400,000 partners. It is the only network that combines all the best travel affiliate offers from companies like Booking.com, Rentalcars.com, and GetYourGuide and puts them under one roof. The network includes travel products, like flight tickets, hotels, car rentals, insurance, transfers, etc. In addition to a collection of numerous credible offers, the Travelpayouts affiliate program provides its partners with a wide range of easy-to-use promotional tools, dedicated and professional customer service, and competitive commissions.

Travelpayouts helps travel brands (and bloggers) monetize their websites by connecting them to a network of many potential affiliate partners worldwide.

Travelpayouts in numbers

• 10 years in the travel niche
• 395,000+ partners
• 110+ brands
• $49M+ total payout since 2011
• $13M+ paid out to partners in 2022

How Does Travelpayouts Work?

With the Travelpayouts affiliate network, you can join over 110 travel affiliate programs and earn up to 70% revenue share for each sale. The programs provide up to 365-day cookies, so you still earn money even if the potential customer doesn’t purchase on the first day and decides to wait. The exact cookie lifetime and commission rate depend on the affiliate program.

Travelpayouts have developed the Affiliates’ tools for their clients’ convenience, such as search forms, widgets, affiliate links, White Labels, etc. Every person may choose the most suitable way of cooperation. You can learn more about this in the article about the offers in the affiliate network.

It works like this:

• Content creators recommend the travel brands they love to their audience and get rewarded for their efforts. For example, an Instagram blogger writes about an interesting GetYourGuide excursion and adds a special link to their booking.
• Travelers book perfect trips at the best price and explore fascinating places near and far.
• Get Your Guide tracks sales and pays the blogger a commission for every successful booking.

Is it really possible to make money with Travelpayouts?

Of course! And they have confirmations in the form of success stories from their partners:

• Megan Starr and Aram Vardanyan, the creators of VirginiaTravelTips.com, earn over $60,000 per month, including through partner programs on the Travelpayouts platform.
• Kieran monetizes his website and mobile app about Ibiza through Travelpayouts. Event ticket affiliate sales account for over 85% of his site’s income.
• Maggie and Michael, the founders of TheWorldWasHereFirst.com, managed to turn their blog into a full-time job.

They share the success stories of different travel bloggers and many of their partners on the Travelpayouts blog.

Reasons why you may want to consider Travelpayouts over other affiliate networks: 

• Travelpayouts is the only travel affiliate network in the world solely focused on travel. If you’re a travel blogger, it’s a no-brainer! Once you sign up, you can apply to join over 100 affiliate programs, including Tripadvisor, Booking.com, Trivago, and many others.

• Registration only takes 3 minutes. Signing up for the Travelpayouts affiliate network is super easy, and it takes as little as 3 minutes. Follow the steps below to create your account in minutes. 

• Payouts start at only $10. You don’t have to wait until you’ve earned thousands of dollars to start getting paid. You only need to hit the $10 threshold.

• Travel offers are available in 50 different languages. This is a travel company with a global presence, so it makes sense that every major language is represented and then some. 

• Many tool options, such as white labels, banners, links, plugins, and more, are available to help you promote your affiliates and earn money. 

• You get access to exclusive tools that are available only to Travelpayouts affiliates, such as a search form for Booking.com.

How do you sign up for Travelpayouts?

Signing up for Travelpayouts is a simple process. When you sign up through my link, you get a bonus of $25 to help you start earning right away. Use the code SOMTO when you sign up to claim your bonus. These are the steps to sign up today and immediately claim your $25 bonus.

1. Go to the Travelpayouts homepage. 
2. Select ‘Get Started’ in the top right-hand corner

3. Enter your email and password.
4. Enter the promo code SOMTO below, which says ‘Enter a promo code.’
5. Select ‘Create Account’

5. After registration, don’t forget to add information about your project that you’ll use to share affiliate tools, and after, you can apply for affiliate programs in the tab “Programmes.”

How to get started with affiliate marketing through Travelpayouts

If you are a beginner in affiliate marketing, start your journey by learning. You can find several free courses on the “Academy” tab that will guide you through making the most of Travelpayouts, getting started the right way, and earning. 

After you arm yourself with knowledge, it’s time to act:

• Research and choose the offer that is relevant to your content and can be useful among your audience 
• Join the affiliate program
• Get affiliate tools. It can link widely used in social media channels and website blogs or banners and widgets used only in website blogs.
• Start promoting

Affiliate reviews will help you find the best options, but remember that high conversion is only possible if you offer the right product to the right audience. Choose according to the needs of your audience and the conditions you get from the affiliate program. 

The following tips will help you boost your earnings with affiliate tools:

• Add affiliate tools to blog pages naturally – search forms, links, and other tools should be where people need them: i.e., It makes no sense to place the link before the article just because it would appear higher.

• Make links visible in the text – they must be a different color than the main text. The reader must intuitively, and without straining, understand that this is a link.
• Make the audience interested in the service you promote – give the reader a reason to want to go. For example, describe the problem in the text and then place a link as the solution.

• If you create your own creative, always add a call to action (CTA).

• Perform experiments – placement, texts, colors, etc. and look for whatever attracts attention and converts better.

The amount of revenue depends on your quality of traffic, the number of targeted actions, and the commission size. This is one of the rare cases when it isn’t necessary to rock a huge website with twenty thousand unique visitors a day to get tangible income.

My Experience with Travelpayouts

I first discovered Travelpayouts in January 2020 when I was invited to speak at their Travel Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas. I met with the super friendly and professional team, getting an inside look at how TravelPayouts works. Since then, I have participated in several other TravelPayouts events and continue to be a huge company fan.

I’ve been doing affiliate marketing since 2018. What I like most about Travelpayouts is it’s exclusively dedicated to the travel niche. There’s no other platform where you can find 100+ travel affiliate programs to join all under one roof. As a travel blogger, Travelpayouts is incredibly convenient and a huge time saver! 

Regarding affiliate marketing, I’ve normally joined individual affiliate programs instead of large affiliate networks. This means I must log into each affiliate program’s portal separately to check my stats and earnings. Travelpayouts eliminates the need for that by showing you a summary of your stats for all your affiliate programs and your total earnings on your dashboard. 

A bonus offer for you to join Travelpayouts today.

I’m offering a special bonus to new registrants to help them get started with Travelpayouts and start earning. When you register with the promo code SOMTO, you’ll get $25 on top of your first payout so that you can monetize immediately! So what are you waiting for? Register right now in minutes and start earning with Travelpayouts. 

Somto Ugwueze

Hi! I'm Somto. Two years ago, I stopped making excuses, ditched my indecisive friends, and started booking flights. Today, I'm a full-time solo traveler on a mission to inspire young women to seek new adventures.