Affiliate Marketing for Travel Bloggers
This guide is all about affiliate marketing for travel bloggers!
Although most of what you’ll find on my blog is travel-related, I thought it would be fun to take you behind the scenes today and share some travel blogging tips with you. Specifically, I wanted to talk about how I monetize my travel blog through affiliate marketing, and how you can do it too.
For a little background, I’ve started multiple profitable blogs (including this one!), including several other travel blogs that I later sold. I’ve also earned multiple six figures from affiliate marketing.
And today, I’m going to share exactly how I’ve monetized this blog through affiliate marketing and turned my passion for travel (and writing about travel) into a lucrative passive income stream.
💻🌴 Before I get into the details… Are you interested in starting a travel blog yourself? I’ve written an easy step-by-step guide to help you get started. Check that out first, then come back here!
Without further ado, let’s take a look at how I make money writing my travel blog…
How I Monetize My Travel Blog
The main way that I make money from Stay to Wander is through affiliate marketing.
I’ve tried a couple of other things too. I briefly used an ad network to place ads on my blog, but they were ugly and disruptive, and for how little I was earning from them each day, it didn’t make sense to impact the user experience in such a negative way. Additionally, I occasionally accept sponsored blog posts from travel brands that pay a fixed fee to get a backlink to their website from my blog.
But affiliate marketing has by far been the most lucrative, most natural, and most passive way of making money for me. And that is why it’s my primary focus when it comes to monetization.
What exactly is affiliate marketing?
In simplest terms, it’s a revenue-sharing arrangement where an affiliate receives a commission for each sale that they drive to a merchant. In other words, you earn money for selling someone else’s product.
To get started with affiliate marketing, you first have to join affiliate programs for the companies or products you want to promote. You’ll then get access to affiliate links, which are unique tracking links that credit any sales you generate back to you so that you earn commission from them.
You can use your affiliate links on your blog, on social media, in your email newsletter, or pretty much anywhere else online. When someone clicks on your affiliate link and makes a purchase, you will earn a commission. It costs nothing extra for the person using your link, but you earn money.
The affiliate program will then release the funds to you (usually a month or so later), and voila, you’re getting paid. Most affiliate programs will pay you by direct deposit straight to your bank account.
How Does This Work for a Travel Blog?
As a travel blogger, I simply write about my travel experiences and share my recommendations and tips. I find plenty of opportunities for naturally incorporating affiliate links into my content.
I earn money from the following types of affiliate programs…
- Hotel affiliate programs (Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, etc.)
- Tour affiliate programs (GetYourGuide and Viator)
- Amazon affiliate program (I recommend travel gear and other travel essentials)
- Other miscellaneous travel affiliate programs (DiscoverCars for rental cars, Omio for trains and buses, Airalo for travel eSIMs, SafetyWing for travel insurance, etc.)
How much commission I earn depends on the affiliate program, but usually it’s anywhere from 5% to 10%.
The great thing about the travel niche is that people often spend a lot of money on booking travel, so commissions can be quite high. Let’s say someone books a $500/night hotel for three nights after clicking one of my affiliate links in a blog post that contains hotel recommendations.
The total booking value for their hotel stay is $1,500, and let’s say the commission I earn is 8% from Booking.com. I would then earn $120 just from recommending that hotel. Not a bad payout!
Affiliate marketing works well for my travel blog because I’m providing valuable free content to my readers and making money from helping them to plan their trips at the same time.
It’s also totally passive income because I can spend a few hours writing a blog post one time, and then I can earn money from the affiliate links in it for months or even years to come.
The Top 3 Affiliate Programs I’m Using
Lots of travel companies run their own affiliate programs (for example, Booking.com, GetYourGuide, and Viator all have independent affiliate programs), but I personally prefer affiliate platforms instead. Affiliate platforms are great because they give you access to many affiliate programs in one place.
This is ideal because you don’t have to keep track of a ton of different account sign-ins, dashboards, and affiliate links. Affiliate platforms negotiate the same commission rates with merchants as you would get if you joined the independent affiliate program, but you also get access to other tools that help you with monetization. You also get paid faster and more frequently with affiliate platforms.
It’s always free to sign up for an affiliate program/platform, though you need to already have your own website. I’d also recommend having some content published already (say, 10-15 blog posts) before you apply. This will give you a better chance of having your application approved than having a brand-new website. As a reminder, I have a guide on how to start a travel blog that you can follow.
These are the top 3 affiliate programs/platforms I’m using to make money:
1. Stay22
I love Stay22 and make money from it every day. This affiliate platform started off with just hotels, but they have expanded to include other travel companies, notably GetYourGuide. After installing a bit of code on your website, Stay22 will automatically convert all links on your website into affiliate links.
This is super convenient because I can just copy and paste the regular Booking.com link to a hotel right into my blog post, and Stay22 will automatically turn that into an affiliate link for me.
They also offer AI-enabled tools that will place additional contextual affiliate links into your blog posts for you, further boosting your monetization. I’m currently using Stay22 for affiliate links for hotels (Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, etc.) as well as for tours on GetYourGuide.
⭐ Want to sign up for Stay22? You can use my referral link and earn a bonus of $100 after you reach your first 100 confirmed bookings with Stay22. (It sounds like a lot, but I reached this in two months!)
2. Travelpayouts
Another great affiliate program is Travelpayouts. You could honestly just use Travelpayouts for your travel blog, because it gives you access to the same affiliate programs as Stay22, and then some.
But since I started using Stay22 first, I like to use Travelpayouts in tandem with it. Travelpayouts works similarly to Stay22 in that it automatically converts links on your website into affiliate links. They also have some cool AI-enabled tools that add smart recommendations and additional links to your content.
Right now, I’m running Travelpayouts and Stay22 at the same time. In my Travelpayouts settings, I have it set to exclude hotel links and GetYourGuide links (since I do those through Stay22.) But I use it for other travel affiliate programs like Viator, DiscoverCars, Omio, Airalo, and a couple of others.
Travelpayouts definitely has a better variety of affiliate programs than Stay22, but I personally prefer the dashboard and tracking features of Stay22. So it works for me to use both platforms at the same time!
⭐ Want to sign up for Travelpayouts? You can join right here. (Also a referral link.)
3. Amazon
Finally, I earn money through the Amazon affiliate program, which is called Amazon Associates. This is less profitable than Stay22 and Travelpayouts, because I don’t use as many Amazon affiliate links in my content, and because the products I recommend on Amazon tend to be less expensive than hotel or tour bookings.
However, it’s still a good supplemental income for my travel blog. I recommend all kinds of travel gear and travel essentials within my blog content, from carry-on luggage to packing cubes and random things like my favorite travel books or travel-inspired gift ideas. I also have an Amazon Storefront for Stay to Wander, which is an affiliate shopping page that is hosted on Amazon’s own website.
When using Amazon links in my blog posts, I use a little tool called SiteStripe, which allows me to grab a custom affiliate link for any product on Amazon. After you join Amazon Associates, this will appear at the top of every page on Amazon for you, and you can quickly copy and paste the link into your blog post.
⭐ Want to sign up for Amazon Associates? You can apply right here, but note that you must generate three affiliate sales within your first six months to stay approved, so don’t apply before you’re ready.
How I Use Affiliate Links in My Content
Now that you know the affiliate programs/platforms I’m using to monetize my travel blog, I wanted to share a little more about how I use affiliate links in my content to make money.
On Stay to Wander, I have currently published more than 400 blog posts, which is a LOT. And the majority of these blog posts (although not all of them!) contain one or more affiliate links.
My blog features the following categories of content:
- Hotel Guides
- Travel Guides
- Day Trips
- Travel Tips
Hotel Guides and Day Trips are the most straightforward, because I’m always using hotel affiliate links or GetYourGuide/Viator affiliate links for day trips and tours in these blog posts.
Some of the blog posts under Travel Guides and Travel Tips are very affiliate-focused, while others are more subtle and may only include one or two (or zero) affiliate links.
I write what I want, and this doesn’t always lend itself to monetization. For example, I have some guides on my blog about free things to do in different cities. Obviously, people searching for “free things to do in NYC” aren’t looking to spend money, and so it doesn’t make sense to use affiliate links.
The reason that my content converts to sales so well is because I only use affiliate links in a natural, organic way. I also include affiliate links in content that is already genuinely helpful to the reader.
Whenever possible, I include my personal recommendations for hotels I’ve actually stayed at, tours I’ve actually done, or travel gear I’ve actually purchased. This helps to establish trust and show expertise with my readers. It’s one of the reasons I think that my content converts so well to affiliate sales.
Want to Make Money from Your Own Travel Recommendations?
I’m honestly always surprised at how few people seem to understand the income potential of affiliate marketing, especially in the travel niche. There’s still a lot of room for you to succeed here!
Many people think that blogging is dead and that no one reads blogs anymore. But for every person who uses TikTok or Instagram to get travel inspiration, I can promise you that there are at least one or two more people searching Google or Pinterest for more detailed travel planning tips, and coming across blogs just like mine. Travel blogs work because you can be more detailed and give specific recommendations.
A 15-second video on social media might inspire you to travel to Lake Como, but when it actually comes to looking for hotels to book or figuring out travel logistics or things to do when you’re there, travel blogs are the answer. A website is still the best medium you can have for making affiliate sales online.
Summing things up…
If you want to make money from your own travel recommendations, here’s what you should do:
- Start a travel blog. Setting up a website is so easy. Buying a .com domain name and a year of web hosting will cost you less than $50. This is your main “hub” on the Internet.
- Publish content on your blog. Guides on where to stay, the best things to do, day-by-day itineraries, mistakes to avoid, what to pack and what to wear, tips and tricks — the options are endless!
- Join travel affiliate platforms like Stay22 and Travelpayouts. Automatically turn links in your blog posts into affiliate links. Earn a commission when someone clicks on your link and makes a purchase.
- Amplify your reach. Google, Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok, Substack — these are all platforms that you can leverage to drive traffic back to your blog and get people reading your content.
And that just about sums it up! I hope you found this introductory guide to affiliate marketing for travel bloggers helpful. If you love to travel and write about it, you might as well get paid to do it.
Related Guides:
