50+ TOP Travel Affiliate Programs — Best CPA Travel Networks and Offers of 2024 for Sites and Online Bloggers

Travel industry is continuously growing and developing: people travel for holidays to get out of daily routine, for educational and business purposes. Tourism and traveling is a huge and pretty profitable niche.  This sector contributes around $7 trillion to the global economy but competition within the industry is pretty tough. Travel agencies are often neglected due to the impressive number of online resources specialized in ticket booking and hotel reservations, cruises, guided tours, etc.

Many businesses related to traveling and tourism invest huge amounts in their platforms to make them functional, user-friendly, and easy to use. Here is an interesting fact: traveling has become one of the first verticals in e-commerce. For instance, the Expedia website, the first customer-oriented travel platform, was launched in 1996. But who doesn’t want more clients? So, companies offer affiliate programs to bloggers, website owners, and influencers to attract even more customers.  

This is an example of ‘win-win’ cooperation: advertisers get more much-needed clients and affiliate marketers top-up their accounts through referring and driving clients to specific brands, companies, or networks.

And indeed, earning on the promotion of travel affiliate offers is possible. Travel bloggers raise money while exploring the world and promoting various services and products whether it be airlines or hotels, insurance, or car rentals. Aside from travel bloggers, owners of websites related to a greater or lesser degree to the travel industry might benefit from travel affiliate programs. But it’s not as easy as it seems and requires time and effort to make your travel affiliate offers work for your good.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Travel Affiliate Programs

It is a fast-growing segment of the market: the generation of millennials is the most traveling and exploring generation. So they tend to explore new regions and countries and gain more experience. This means a wide field for travel bloggers, webmasters, and marketers. Let’s have a good look at some pros and cons of joining travel affiliate programs.

Advantages:

• High payment rates: The percentage might not look impressive, but with hotel accommodation costing around $1 000 per week and international flights’ price around $1 000+ the payouts could be counted in dozens or hundreds or even thousands (see examples of successful travel blogs below) of dollars.
• Content creation is actually fun. Add here some interesting photo and video materials with experience-based advice — you might be surprised with conversion rates.
• Quality affiliate programs: Offering programs from respectful brands (like well-known airlines, hotel chains, etc.) your visitors won’t question the reliability of your recommendations and offers.
• Broad-ranging instruments and tools. Companies are also interested in attracting as many customers as possible, so they provide marketers and webmasters with various tools, such as widgets, search forms, banners, etc.  All that is left to do is to pick up the suitable options.

Disadvantages:

• Not an easy task: it requires time, market analysis, and targted traffic. If your site or blog is dedicated to one destination, you’ll need highly targeted traffic to get high conversion rates. Travel bloggers strive to cover as many regions as possible to attract more visitors to their platform. In such a case they tend to work with several affiliate programs (flights, hotels, vacation-related products).
• Second, the already mentioned problem is indeed tough competition: in case of general and widely used keywords (i.e. "best hotels in ...") you have to compete with huge companies like Booking, Expedia, TripAdvisor, etc. The solution: search for less competitive keywords and improve your content’s value to attract visitors and increase your traffic.          
• The next challenge is the low lifetime value (LTV) of clients who read your posts about specific destinations only when they plan a trip.

Tip: you still can keep your visitors interested by offering materials about some products they might need during vacation (for example, Amazon), insurance, etc.

Also, you should keep in mind seasons and trends. This aspect isn’t an advantage or disadvantage, however, it might help you to promote some affiliate programs more efficiently.  Beach relaxation or Ibiza clubs, Christmas celebrations or Disneyland trips, educational summer camps, or international sport events — think about patterns and seasons and prepare proper ads in advance.

Latent opportunities: It is no secret that the competition in this vertical is zoomed for the English-speaking audience. Other languages are useful here: Spanish and French-speaking audiences are large enough to get paid for sharing offers, to mention only a few. Moreover, focus on other regions than Miami and New York, where the competition for keywords and offers is lower, so it’s much easier to get it to the top ranking.  

Traveling and blogging at the same time is both fun and a tough job. But if you implement the right strategies to monetize your website or a blog using travel affiliate programs, sooner or later your patience and hard work will be rewarded with success and profit. Besides making money through travel affiliate programs some very successful bloggers occasionally receive bonuses from their affiliate partners as a free trip.

Categories in the Travel Affiliate Vertical

The travel vertical can be divided into numerous branches: budget travel, youth or backpack travel, luxury travel, exploration or adventure travel, airlines, travel companies reviews, and many more. Whatever path you chose you’ll still have several categories of affiliate programs to join (relevant to your content or in line with your traveling and marketing experience).

• Hotels and accommodation. Platforms offering accommodation programs can be divided into search services, networks, and hotel chains (i.e. Marriott, Hilton, etc.). Platforms like Booking.com, Agoda, and Trivago offer numerous tools equipped with filters to find a hotel/hostel of any brand in almost any part of the world.  

• Transportation (flights, railway, buses). Most of the time we, as customers, deal with search services like JetRadar, Skyscanner, or Aviasales, which help us find the best deals and cheapest tickets. But some people prefer certain airlines (they might collect miles or simply got used to the level of service). The commission is paid as a percentage of the tickets’ price (flight tickets — around 1-3%, bus and train tickets — up to 7%), as a fixed amount (per passenger) or as a percentage of the mediator’s commission (up to 50% and even more in some cases — a typical system for search services). Affiliate programs of some reputable companies (i.e. Lufthansa, British Airways, Emirates, etc.) can be profitable for webmasters but competition in this vertical is very high, so you’ll have to compete for high ranking with affiliates and networks with solid budgets. Besides, you should thoroughly consider the targeted audience.    
• Insurance. Insurance companies cover such unpleasant issues as medical emergencies, trip cancellations or interruptions, lost luggage, and many others. World Nomads, Travel Guard, or Roam Right are just a few insurance companies that offer affiliate programs. When you leave your comfort zone and go for a trip you’d prefer to secure yourself and protect any potential troubles. So do many other people. Well, commission for insurance offers is rewarding: 15-25%; some companies offer cookies duration 365 days!
• Luggage and clothing, photo and video equipment, all kinds of vacation-related items (adapters, power banks). It’s easy — Amazon (as one of the leaders in affiliate marketing) or any other manufacturer or brand at your option.
• Tours (travel agents). This sector includes package tours (domestic and international), sightseeing and excursions. This type of offer is useful for topics dedicated to a specific destination or a country. You may consider offering full packages (flight+transfer+hotel) or specific tours with a company of your choice (TUI, Travco, Thomas Cook, Neckermann, etc). Usually works well for destination-specialized blogs and sites (Thailand, Bali, Greece, Italy, France, Spain, Egypt, India, etc.).
• Car rentals. People rent a car not only for a transfer but to travel across a country or several countries (EU) on their own discovering new places. Consider your audience: whether they prefer standard packages or individual tours. As of now many people prefer traveling with no strings attached – they select places and routes by themselves and fancy to rent a car (sometimes with a driver) to feel free and visit less known places out-of-range of standard tours.

How to Let Travel Affiliate Programs Top Up Your Account

How much is it possible to earn through travel affiliate programs? Well, there is no single answer. Hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands or just a couple of bucks — it depends on you, your blog/site, experience, knowledge, and efforts. Scale of your audience, blog/website content, and niche are probably the major factors to influence your potential profit.

There are plenty of various ways to join travel affiliate programs. Most of them are free, still, read thoroughly the details of every program. You may promote a single offer or a company. Owners of travel websites and blogs might benefit from banners, widgets, and search forms to get more sales. Some companies offer recurring affiliate programs where a recurring commission is paid as long as they get customers through your ads (usually, hotels, insurance, and transport). Long-term cooperation is profitable. For example, Booking.com offers a commission rate according to the number of bookings: less than 50 bookings per month — 25%, 51-150 bookings — 30%, 151-500 bookings — 35%, and 501 and more bookings per month — 40%.

Keywords research: low competition keywords help you get a higher ranking on search engines, therefore, drive more traffic and, potentially, more sales. As a case in point, product-based keywords with high search volume and low competition are perfect candidates to be used in your articles or posts. Besides, don’t forget to monetize keywords using the Amazon affiliate program. For instance, by promoting useful but low-cost items you’ll get a commission somewhere under a dollar while sales of $600 camera or $150 hiking shoes will be much more noticeable. However, avoid very specialized and localized keywords when search volume is too low and your resource isn’t ranked on the top.

For travel bloggers, text links usually work better than banners (see Example 1 below). There are two types of posts that usually pay off: experience-based stories (you share some personal experience or provide useful lifehacks) and "How to…" articles (How to learn kitesurfing in Egypt? or How to travel Europe in 10 days?).

Don’t get greedy, choose programs and offers that match your content. For instance, imagine, your blog is dedicated to Indonesia. So flight tickets to Canada or car rentals in Latin America are very unlikely to attract your readers to click the link.

Yet do not overcrowd a page with ads – nobody wants to see banners and links with no useful or interesting information. Value your audience, invest some time to produce quality content or involving, experience-based reviews (sure, with links to places or services you recommend).  Experiment with banner ads design and location (to earn more than with the help of Adsense). Many successful blog pages open the doors to higher income.

One more interesting example — ytravelblog. In fact, we liked the post "11 of the best suitcases for easy travel". It seems that no one would read a huge post dedicated to suitcases.

Y-Travel used this table of contents with links to get ranks and traffic. It worked! Only for this post the blog gets 5 000 visitors (organic search), which is the only ⅛ of their total search engine traffic.

Yes, you can promote hotel chains but a smart approach helps to get successful even with specific products. In this case, a click on the affiliate link in the table of contents takes a visitor to Amazon with a rather high probability of conversion.

How to Promote Travel Affiliate Programs & Traffic Sources

To drive traffic to your travel affiliate offers you may use all popular traffic sources, including:

• SEO in all varieties (for blogs/websites and forums). Content projects such as websites and blogs with a loyal audience and subscribers work well enough. Original content and unique useful articles written using SEO techniques might help to expand horizons in terms of traffic. There are useful tools (search bars and widgets) that make blogs more user-friendly and help to drive more traffic. Usually, people look for information about countries, sightseeing, currency exchange, and experience-based lifehacks supported with original photos.
• Social media campaign (Facebook and Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest). Social media traffic in this niche works pretty well because people like reading about interesting and beautiful places around the world. Social media campaigns may be held in two ways: first, if you have a group or a community (Facebook, Instagram) you can post and promote articles and recommendations containing links to the source. Second, you can use target ads.

Managing YouTube channels is rather similar to running social networks’ pages. Make interesting brief videos on "Travel around India in 10 days" or "Must see places in Prague" boosted with practical tips and lifehacks. People subscribe easily to channels with regular updates on hot deals and discounts on trips all over the world. Yet, be creative working on your content to let it stand out.

Pinterest. It is a must. Why? It is more of a search engine than social media. Make your post with keyword-containing description to get higher ranks in Pinterest search and you’ll get surprised how many Pinterest users will follow your pins in the future.    

• E-mail database. Build and expand it! But keep in mind that e-mail marketing doesn’t mean spamming.
• Affiliate marketing. The travel sector is very competitive and bloggers/webmasters are sometimes just intermediaries in a long chain of advertisers. Therefore, individual publishers are paid just a small amount with no motivation to invest in getting additional traffic. That’s why many bloggers put more value on free organic traffic. Except for the cases when you cooperate with a brand or a company directly (but usually they set some requirements in terms of traffic/audience to affiliates). Moreover, many customers book tickets and hotels several months before the trip, so earnings aren’t available at once. Traffic arbitrage for travel affiliate offers we would recommend for more experienced marketers.  

Let’s say, you have experience with affiliate marketing and offers, but still there are some specific features of travel affiliate programs to consider.

1. Commission. The average industry commission rate is around 10% but for tickets, the standard is 1-3%, for tours — 5-7%, and for insurance — 5-25%. There are programs with very low payouts. For example, if you sell some apparel you will earn several cents per sold piece of clothing, so you have to sell 10 of them to get a single dollar. So, do the math before applying to a program and be down to earth because even if your commission is $50 per sale nobody will ever get interested, so it isn’t worth it.
2. Cookie duration. The longer cookie duration is better for you. Why? Because a user may click your link, hesitate for a while, then he/she purchases a product or a service. With long-term cookie duration, the user is tracked as your referral.
3. Instruments and tools. A travel niche is known for a wide selection of various instruments usually available to affiliates: widgets, plugins, and different search forms besides different types of links. Some brands even offer free API (though not easy to get them).

Conversion rates depend on the webmaster’s skills to drive traffic and tools/instruments an advertiser offers. And yet again: your readers will smell it right away if you create content only for sales with no value.

CPA Travel Programs

Well, there are two options to work with affiliate programs: directly with a brand (company) or through a network (see below). Working with brands directly you may discuss your commission rates (in case you have something to offer them like your organic traffic volume, active and dynamic audience). Furthermore, if your partnership is successful you might open new opportunities (guest posts, content swaps). In the case of affiliate networks commissions are less flexible but usually, they set lower limits for withdrawals.  

CPA travel affiliate networks offer an all-in-one solution for website owners and bloggers. Hundreds or even thousands of offers are collected in a single place. This kind of platform greatly saves time providing rates, cookies duration, and other details related to offers. Affiliate in-house programs represent great options in case you’re an experienced blogger, however, networks might be more comfortable for both pros and beginners. And not least, networks usually provide extensive technical support and attractive commission rates to affiliates. Smart approach: while checking programs in a network pick out brands you really like and your audience would benefit from.

For starters, you may choose one of the affiliate networks you are familiar with or you know well, such as Commission Junction, Amazon, and so on. We also recommend considering one of the well-reputed travel affiliate networks with positive reviews from marketers.  

As for other reliable networks, you may check offers at CJ Affiliates, Booking, and Flex Offers. Some of them work with established international brands, such as Samsonite, eBags, Nike, and provide more than 10 000+ affiliate programs (hotels, flights, tours, and museums). For beginners, it’s much easier to join a network than to deal with in-house programs where requirements to affiliates are much higher.

Amazon Associates Program. No limits to your imagination: you can promote digital cameras along with photography courses for those vacationers who want to record their memories and impressions in a skillful and artistic way, or power banks and adapters. The standard commission for Amazon programs is 4%, but depending on the product you promote it may vary from 2 to 10%. And the best thing with Amazon is that you are paid when a referred person buys any product from Amazon, not only a specific product that you promote.

ShareASale, Maxbounty, and some other affiliate networks work with various programs of all kinds. You can find numerous hotels and airlines, including Riu hotels and Qatar Airways. As experience shows, it is easier to get minimum payout with a network than through some in-house affiliate programs.

Example #1

One of the giants in travel blogging is Nomadic Matt. Its owner, Matthew Kepnes, has become a bestselling author for the New York Times.  

The website has around 270k+ visitors monthly (organic search) and 7k referring domains. The owner sells books and derives benefit from original content through affiliate marketing.

Having built trust with the audience, Nomadic Matt deploys very organic text-only links within his posts, which sound more as personal experience-based stories. For example, in his post about travel insurance he brought to the attention occasions when he needed insurance while traveling. A simple text-link to World Nomads (an insurance company) and a widget for a quote from the same company work pretty well.

Indeed, smart:

We think he is quite satisfied with his monthly income. Indeed a great example of online money-making via travel affiliate programs.

Example #2

Jeremy, an owner of Living the Dream, is a travel blogger. He and his wife Angie have been traveling and blogging for 10 years: 5 continents and 73 countries.

According to Jeremy, they make around $30 000 per year through travel affiliate programs (the second source of income after CPM ads). In the blog, the couple shares their cut-and-try method with various programs and how they promote them and how much they earn on every program.

The couple has spent months testing placements for programs and still consider they could do better despite being quite successful.

Having worked in the past with brand hotels (i.e. Hilton) via Rakuten and non-branded hotels on Booking.com and CPL via HotelsCombined they made around $3 000 per year. It wasn’t satisfactory, then in 2018 (after testing) they have chosen to use the broad Booking.com option with booking widgets at the end of posts customizing them in accordance with a region or a city mentioned in an article (because the audience needs more specific advice). Currently, they make roughly $15 000 per year.

Next, Walks of Italy affiliate (with conversion 10%+) and Eurail and Omio add $5 000 and $3 000 per year respectively. Furthermore, Amazon affiliates ($2 500), Skyscanner ($500), and WorldNomads ($500) add up to the family budget as well. Jeremy has also shared their blog expenses:

Generally, they make between $25 000 and $30 000 per year on travel affiliate programs, but they plan to go further and turn their income into $100 000 per year.

By way of summary, trends come and go but anyway, people will travel for various reasons, including business, vacations and education. It is a blooming vertical. With a smart approach travel affiliate programs might load your account considerably.