Affiliate marketing allows travel agencies to market their services with a low budget, less effort, and at a well-contained risk level. While doing so, it guarantees a high return on investment, an increment in brand awareness, and overall business growth.
Well, certain things sound too good to be true, isn’t it?
The fact is that if you leverage an affiliate marketing campaign that is highly targeted and effective, you can naturally benefit your travel business. You just need to identify a target market and select the perfect set of programs that suit your brand.
There are many travel affiliate programs that benefit travel agencies and bloggers to some extent. But the question here is: how does the travel agency benefit from affiliate marketing?
Don’t worry! In this write-up, we have created a comprehensive guide on the benefits of affiliate marketing for travel agencies. Additionally, we have listed the top three travel affiliate programs which you can join any time, from anywhere.
Furthermore, the comprehensive FAQs section should help you know more about travel affiliate marketing.
Let’s get started!
Benefits of Affiliate Marketing for Travel Agencies
Affiliate marketing opens doors to advertising opportunities. If you provide an attractive commission while keeping your profit margin in check, you can work with leading travel influencers without any cost and risk.
1. Affiliates Help to Boost Your Reputation
As you partner with trusted and reputable websites, you can easily increase the reputation of your brand and services. These reputable partners will solidify your customer’s confidence in your travel services which means that your travel agency attracts more customers.
Travel service consumers are more likely to trust a third party’s opinion over the opinion of the websites that sell services. Consequently, you can boost your sales and scale your overall travel business with the help of your affiliate partners.
2. Lets You Broaden Your Audience
Affiliate marketing allows a business to target specific niches that match the business’s core audience. If you run a travel agency, you can always find relevant travel websites to align with.
The great benefit of affiliate marketing is that most affiliates you find will already have an established visitor base. With these partnerships, you get the opportunity to expand out in the new market and strengthen your online presence. As you make your online presence strong, you can broaden your audience and scale your travel business.
3. Cost-Effective Approach
Affiliate marketing can be a cost-effective approach. You are only paying commission when the desired conversion occurs. It means that you don’t have to throw away ad dollars on placements that have no proven value.
Similarly, recruiting new affiliates is an easy way to brand yourself in the market without investing in a marketing campaign. Once you select your affiliates, there is reasonably little effort required from you to market your travel services.
4. Helps Scale Your Traffic and Sales
Compared to other marketing campaigns, recruiting affiliates to your program will let you scale your traffic faster. With more websites connecting to your travel site as a partner, your opportunity of conversion will increase.
Although affiliate links don’t have a direct impact on your website’s search engine rankings, they make sure that more people search for your products and navigate your travel site to book your services. In addition to a higher flow of referral traffic, you can also expect a boost to your organic and direct traffic.
5. Boosts Your Competitiveness
Affiliate marketing has grown in recent years as one of the most sought-after marketing techniques. Although most industries have started to consider it, there are still a few who neglect it. Thus, if you get into the game early, you have a much better chance of scaling your business faster.
The competition in affiliate marketing is getting tougher each day. Mostly, established brands can easily utilize the best marketers and publishers to their advantage. On the flip side, if you are a small brand or new to the business, you should come up with out-of-the-box ideas to entice marketers to your side.
Since affiliate marketing has still the potential to grow, you can quickly increase your competitiveness through affiliates. The thing is that, with affiliate marketing, you get the opportunity to understand how your industry works and how to make deals with the most important influencers.
6. High Return on Investment (ROI)
Affiliate marketing has a much higher return on investment than the majority of marketing strategies. The biggest reason for that is because your target audiences hear about your travel services from affiliates that are inside their spheres of influence.
To make it more clear, you channel your marketing efforts via an affiliate who has direct influence and access over a highly targeted audience that is receptive to what your business offers.
How Can You Join Travel Affiliate Programs?
If you’re looking to join travel affiliate programs and earn commission through referrals, the process is quite easy. You can simply visit their site and apply for the specific affiliate program.
However, before clicking the join button, you should read their affiliate marketing policies as these programs vary from one another. Some affiliate programs provide you with high commissions while you may have to settle for low rates with others.
Upon joining an affiliate program, you will get a unique link to promote and earn money. As soon as your web visitor clicks on the link and visits the affiliate partners’ site, a cookie differentiating the affiliate gets placed on their computer. The cookie guarantees that the publisher receives the referral sale even if it transpires days or even weeks later.
If you run a travel website, you can use their Banner Ads to land more sales and increase your revenue.
Top 3 Travel Affiliate Programs in the Market
As we already discussed how beneficial affiliate marketing is for travel agencies, we will now list the three best travel affiliate programs in the market.
1. TripAdvisor Affiliate Program
TripAdvisor is one of the largest travel websites in the world. Most people visit this popular website for reviews, recommendations, and bookings. While planning a trip, you can look into TripAdvisor for the necessary recommendations.
TripAdvisor offers your visitors the ability to book the best deals for hotels, flights, and vehicle rentals. Besides, it provides the platform to book restaurants or even sightseeing tours.
The affiliate program of TripAdvisor is operated through the Commission Junction (CJ) affiliate. Once you create your account on CJ, you can start promoting the TripAdvisor affiliate program.
After you get an affiliate link from TripAdvisor, you can source content from its website and then link your users to your original content using your tracking link. Whenever your visitors click on the TripAdvisor affiliate button or the advertisement banner, they get redirected to TripAdvisor partner sites.
The affiliate program lets you earn a minimum of 50% commission. You can even boost your earnings up to 80% depending upon the type of service you promote through your travel website.
TripAdvisor offers a 14-day referral window. It means that when your visitor returns to TripAdvisor within the 14 days period and clicks their hotel partners, you receive credit and earn a commission. The commission gets transferred to your PayPal account on a monthly basis.
Quick Details:
- Commission Rate: Minimum 50%
- Cookie Duration: 14 days
- Minimum Payout: $200
- Payment Method: PayPal
Join TripAdvisor Affiliate Program
2. Booking.com Affiliate Program
Booking.com is a huge platform that offers over 28 million accommodation listings, including homes, apartments, and other novel places to stay.
Booking.com is a metasearch engine for booking hotels, apartments, resorts, flight rockets, and so on. You can earn decent money using the Booking.com affiliate program. It is totally free to join and introduces an easy sign-up process for your convenience.
You can effortlessly integrate the search box into your travel website to promote the Booking.com affiliate program. Similarly, you can place banners and use deep affiliate links inside the different places of your travel website.
If you’re using WordPress as your CMS, you can install and activate the official Booking.com WordPress plugin on your travel website and display the search box. The search box encourages your users to search for hotel accommodation right from your website. The moment they make their first booking, you get a reasonable commission.
For each confirmed booking through your affiliate link, you get the commission when the person completes the stay. The minimum affiliate commission rate of this program is 25%. You can earn up to 40% depending upon the bookings that you make within a month.
The payments are regularly executed through PayPal one month after the property verifies that the guests have completed their stay.
Quick Details:
- Commission Rate: Up to 40%
- Cookie Duration: 24 hours
- Minimum Payout: $100
- Payment Method: PayPal
Join Booking.com Affiliate Program
3. Agoda Affiliate Program
Agoda was founded in 2005 as the sister company of Booking.com. Now, it offers flight and hotel deals that span over two million properties worldwide.
You can earn up to 7% commission through the Agoda affiliate program on each successful booking from your affiliate link. It features a performance-based commission structure that includes:
- 4 percent commission for less than 50 bookings
- 4.5 percent commission for bookings between 50 and 99
- 5 percent commission for bookings between 100 and 199
- 6 percent commission for bookings between 200 and 999
- 7 percent commission for more than 999 bookings
After you apply to Agoda’s affiliate program, you need to take note that it may take some 48 to 72 hours to get approved. If you have your own personal travel website, the chances for approval increase.
Once you get approved, you can place deep links inside your content. Similarly, you can also add beautiful image banners to your travel website. The search box also helps your visitors to search different properties right from your website.
The total cookie duration of the Agoda affiliate program is limited to the session when your referral visits Agoda.com via your link. If they leave the website and return back an hour later to book anything, you don’t get any commission.
You receive your affiliate payment every month once you reach the minimum commission threshold of $200. The mode of payment is via direct bank transfer.
Note: You can easily the Agoda affiliate program through ShareASale.
Agoda Affiliate Program Details:
- Commission Rate: Up to 7%
- Cookie Duration: 30 days
- Minimum Payout: $200
- Payment Method: Bank Transfer
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What do you mean by affiliate networks?
Affiliate networks are the intermediaries between merchants that sell services and affiliates who promote those services. These networks enable affiliates to explore through advertisers and join their programs in one place. Affiliate networks facilitate brands to reach a larger audience by utilizing the network to recruit affiliates.
Are there any specific requirements for joining a travel affiliate program?
To get started, you need either a travel website or a travel blog where you post content related to travel. After that, you need a medium to receive money which can be a PayPal account or via bank account. If you have a website with an SSL certificate as well as a business email address joined to your domain, it helps you a lot.
Note that some affiliate programs demand a substantial amount of online traffic on your website. Having a website with free-flowing traffic is a bonus; however, it’s not always mandatory.
Why do most affiliate marketers fail?
The fact is that 95% of internet marketers and affiliate marketers fail to make any money online. Well, this is not because affiliate marketing doesn’t work. It is typically because people don’t know the proper way to execute it and their expectations of the time it takes to earn the income is just too short.
Too many shortcuts, impatience, and too little focus are the main reasons why most affiliate marketers fail. It is possible to make a six or seven-figure income if you get the right knowledge and skills and focus on hard work.
Do I need any qualifications to become an affiliate marketer?
First of all, there is no education qualification required to become an affiliate marketer. However, you must at least have the skills to write well and sell.
A blog post you write to promote your affiliate product should be engaging and should hold the right tone and style. You must focus on keeping your audience engaged in your content that would eventually get them to buy services through your links.
Is affiliate marketing legal?
Affiliate marketing is absolutely legal. It comes with a lot of earning potential which is in fact limitless. You can earn hundreds and thousands of dollars per month through affiliate marketing depending on how you approach it. If done correctly, you can even make millions.
You may look at the earning potential and think whether you are contravening any laws. However, this is not the situation with affiliate marketing.
Our Verdict
In a nutshell, the benefits of affiliate marketing for travel agencies are very vast. If you can execute this marketing strategy properly, you can make the most out of its benefits. Expanding your online marketing possibilities through affiliates is the strategy you can use to scale your business.
As affiliate marketing is on the rise, the benefits of affiliate marketing are apparent to businesses of all sizes. You can implement the marketing strategy and see the result for yourself.
We hope that this comprehensive guide on how the travel agency benefits from affiliate marketing helps you to generate more income. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.
