Whether you are a budding travel agent or have an established agency, the most basic requisite for your business is a competitive inventory of flights, hotels, rental cars, cruise and vacation packages that you can sell to your customers.
Joining affiliate programs of reputed travel companies not only help you provide your customers with a wide range of inventory but also helps you earn money at a very low cost to your business. Here are some of the most well-paying travel affiliate programs in the world.
1) Expedia
When it comes to Affiliate programs, Expedia is probably the biggest name out there today. The Expedia Affiliate Network or the EAN helps travelers find the best inventory of hotels, flights and vacation packages. They offer 5% commission from the Expedia Collect Inventory and earn further 50% commission on every hotel reservation and completion of stay. Your customers can check ratings and review of the hotel and then go ahead with the booking.
As an affiliate partner you have access to the Affiliate center of Expedia and you can view the details of payments in the stats section of the Affiliate center. You get paid once a month and the payment is made once you cross the $50 mark.
2) Booking.com
It is one of the leading companies for hotel reservations and offers unbeatable prices and does not charge a fee on booking through their website but charges its accommodation partners a small fee.
Its affiliate partner program has a track record of providing great earning potential. You get paid on each finalized bookings. The commission starts from 25% and goes up to 40% depending on the number of bookings finalized from your website.
3) Viator
As an affiliate partner of Viator, which is the largest source of activities and sightseeing, you can sell activities from your website, blog, and email marketing. You can simply place widgets, banners and links on your travel website. You get paid once the customer books and travels the sightseeing tour. Viator pays 5% commission after you have acquired a minimum payment threshold of $100 for cheques and $50 for EFT.
You can use popular widgets and feeds as marketing tools to generate more traffic and hence more commissions.
Your customers can browse and book from thousands of attractions, sightseeing tours, and transfers in 75+ countries and over 450 destinations across the world.
4) TripAdvisor
TripAdvisor offers your customers to access millions of ratings and reviews and as many as 5000000 hotels to compare, which is the USP of this affiliate program and will in turn make it easy for your customers to compare, search and book through your website. This in turn will help your website attract a lot of traffic. In this program you do not get paid according to the traditional criteria of commissions per booking, rather they pay you on the basis of how much quality traffic you redirect to their website.
You can earn a 50% commission on the revenues generated when your customers click on the commercial links on your website. It offers a wide range of advertising options like banners, text-links, widgets, logos, buttons and badges. You can earn additional incentives if you can drive a certain volume of traffic to the website. The average click-out rate is $.15 to $.75 per click-out.
You can track and monitor commissions 24/7 after signing in to the Commission Junction where you can get update on the sales and commissions on a daily basis.
5) Dohop.com
Dohop has been named as the “World’s Leading Flight Comparison Website” at the World travel awards and they combine flight and rental cars. They offer 5 EUR (approximately $ 5.6) on every booking, which is quite profitable.
They offer commission, pay per click and also on every booking that is made on your website. Pay per click simply means that when your customers browse through various options of flights and click on them to know more about them, you get paid for each click. So, you can earn both ways and the best thing is that the higher is the traffic on your website the higher will be the percentage of commission you can earn. There are vendors who pay 50% commission on every booking that is made on their site.
6) CruiseDirect.com
An affiliate partnership for cruises is promising because cruises are becoming increasingly popular.
As a CruiseDirect affiliate, you have to put links on your website and you will get paid a commission for every booking through your website. Any new websites or established websites are encouraged to work as affiliate partners. You can get approval within 24 hours of application.
You get 3% commission on bookings and you get paid as soon as the payment is received by the supplier.
7) Hotels Combined
This affiliate program will help your customers access a huge inventory of hotels, compare prices and availability from the best travel sites on your website or mobile site. It offers seamless integration of its hotel inventory with the travel agent’s website so that you do not have additional development costs to your business.
It is well known for high payouts and you can earn anywhere between $1 to $4 per click and what’s more appealing is that you can earn multiple times from the same customer.
You can view traffic stats and earnings in real time. You can analyse and optimize your performance through Advanced reporting options.
You get free customized solutions and tools for your sites and apps.
You can get help in building your own mobile app and monetize mobile traffic from it.
8) Priceline Partner Network
Priceline Partner Network provides a customizable booking engine that suits each partner’s needs. They offer flights, hotels, vacation packages, and rental cars.
For airlines you can earn a 3% commission on the bookings, on hotel bookings you can earn 3% to 7% and a 3% earnings can be earned on vacation packages and car rentals.
While Affiliate programs are the easiest way for a travel agency to start selling tourism products, it also means dependency on the supplier to pay the commissions as the booking fulfillment and payments are taken care of by the supplier itself.
Note: The purpose of this article is simply to educate people on the various travel affiliate programs available in the market. We are not connected with any of these programs, nor do we have an affiliate program of our own, so please do not contact us for any affiliate inquiries.
Agoda is not good choice for becoming affiliate partner. I have agoda inventory placed on my website and regularly sending traffic but they dont show any traffic received. When i raise this with their support, they said they have issue. Even after months, they have not corrected it. I have reply from support admitting they have issue. I sent them screenshot of Google analytics event tracking where one can track link clicked via adding labels.
It seems that they are doing it willfully so that affiliate do not come to exact conclusion and defend. So i would say, they are not good choice for hotel booking affiliate.
Sorry, i first replied on wrong comment. Pls delete from there if required
Beware of Viator, for they fail to pay their suppliers. They owe us tens of thousands and don’t even respond to emails in any of their departments. Next step is the BBB, then class action lawsuit, since our firm isn’t the only one that they failed to pay.
I have been trying to work with Viator. Very few sales and found people don’t like to book with viator. They like to book with merchant. I do lots of referrals but very low sales. Viator even has a promo sale for new customers and that negates the referral. So I am so far very disappointed with Viator. Plus they don’t tell you the merchant so you are not sure who you are actually selling the tour for.
I’ve been reffering bokking.com affiliates for one year. I have so many refferals and approx. 1500 unique visitors but very few reservations. The worst thing is 50 % of the reservations (even the finalized ones) are being cancelled in one or two days. How can i trust them when i can not control anything. Anybody knows how to follow and be sure with the the reservations and cencelations?
Is this also because Booking.com has an appalling in-session booking model? So if somebody clicks on your link, goes to Booking.com, closes the browser, opens up another Booking.com browser 1 minute later and then books something you will NOT get any commission! Whereas TripAdvisor has a 2 week cookie window and Expedia has a 30 day window
Bonjour
Suis originaire d’Afrique précisément du Gabon j’aimerais vendre des produits touristiques à l’international pour ça je souhaiterais signer un partenariat d’affiliation Win /Win .
What’s the difference between Viator and Tripadvisor? Viator offers many options for activities on Maui in Hawaii, but there’s not much incentive to buy from a third party website.
Great article but I am sure that there are a lot of travel agencies that launch their affiliate programs without a third party.
In fact, agencies list their services in Tripadvisor for example, and then they pay commissions for each booking. TripAdvisor shares the commissions (which companies pay) with other bloggers who promote its services. Indeed, bloggers get only a percentage of the full commission.
Bloggers can get commissions from companies without using third party affiliates like trip advisor, booking and others. Here is one example https://www.moroccotravel.co/affiliates/ and you can look for others, there are plenty.
[…] and airlines. So, if Booking.com takes a 30% commission from hospitality players, and pays a 25% commission to affiliate travel agents, the travel agent will ultimately receive 7.5% of the booking […]
Awesome..!
But how to get these affaliations..
For that you will have to contact the said OTAs and register with them.
You forget to add Agoda
Thanks for reminding us!
Agoda is not good choice for becoming affiliate partner. I have agoda inventory placed on my website and regularly sending traffic but they dont show any traffic received. When i raise this with their support, they said they have issue. Even after months, they have not corrected it. I have reply from support admitting they have issue. I sent them screenshot of Google analytics event tracking where one can track link clicked via adding labels.
It seems that they are doing it willfully so that affiliate do not come to exact conclusion and defend. So i would say, they are not good choice for hotel booking affiliate.
Sorry, i first replied on wrong comment. Pls delete from there if required
Beware of Viator, for they fail to pay their suppliers. They owe us tens of thousands and don’t even respond to emails in any of their departments. Next step is the BBB, then class action lawsuit, since our firm isn’t the only one that they failed to pay.
I have been trying to work with Viator. Very few sales and found people don’t like to book with viator. They like to book with merchant. I do lots of referrals but very low sales. Viator even has a promo sale for new customers and that negates the referral. So I am so far very disappointed with Viator. Plus they don’t tell you the merchant so you are not sure who you are actually selling the tour for.
Great Info…Thanks For Sharing
I’ve been reffering bokking.com affiliates for one year. I have so many refferals and approx. 1500 unique visitors but very few reservations. The worst thing is 50 % of the reservations (even the finalized ones) are being cancelled in one or two days. How can i trust them when i can not control anything. Anybody knows how to follow and be sure with the the reservations and cencelations?
Is this also because Booking.com has an appalling in-session booking model? So if somebody clicks on your link, goes to Booking.com, closes the browser, opens up another Booking.com browser 1 minute later and then books something you will NOT get any commission! Whereas TripAdvisor has a 2 week cookie window and Expedia has a 30 day window
Bonjour
Suis originaire d’Afrique précisément du Gabon j’aimerais vendre des produits touristiques à l’international pour ça je souhaiterais signer un partenariat d’affiliation Win /Win .
What’s the difference between Viator and Tripadvisor? Viator offers many options for activities on Maui in Hawaii, but there’s not much incentive to buy from a third party website.
Great…Thanks For Sharing this information
Great article but I am sure that there are a lot of travel agencies that launch their affiliate programs without a third party.
In fact, agencies list their services in Tripadvisor for example, and then they pay commissions for each booking. TripAdvisor shares the commissions (which companies pay) with other bloggers who promote its services. Indeed, bloggers get only a percentage of the full commission.
Bloggers can get commissions from companies without using third party affiliates like trip advisor, booking and others. Here is one example https://www.moroccotravel.co/affiliates/ and you can look for others, there are plenty.