How We Got Through 2020 at Travelpayouts

Numbers

This year, income in the travel niche hasn’t been encouraging for anyone. But, we found out that nothing could stop people from traveling. When the borders closed, travelers started exploring their countries as far as possible. Our advertisers and affiliates made everything to help people take interesting and safe trips even during these challenging times.

How Much We’ve Paid in 2020

Paid out to affiliates within the year: $3,517,764
Maximum monthly payout to one affiliate in 2020: $90,135
Maximum payout for one booking: $1,293

Top 10 Affiliate Payouts per Year, $

339,610
327,590
123,254
125,941
74,265
64,477
64,128
57,493
54,928
44,520

More Numbers

42,000 new affiliates have joined Travelpayouts this year.
We’ve connected 16 new advertisers.
Our support team has answered 13,177 questions.
60% of requests have been processed within one hour.

New Affiliate Programs at Travelpayouts

This year, Travelpayouts connected 16 new advertisers.

Among them:

The last two programs in the list above are platforms for search and purchase of insurances. Concern for health and increased interest in travel insurances has been a trend for 2020, which is likely to continue in 2021.

Top 10 Most Lucrative Affiliate Programs

Below, you’ll find ten programs that the largest number of affiliates made money with this year.

New Affiliate Tools at Travelpayouts

This spring, we launched Money Script, a much-awaited tool that will help you to automatically turn all website links into affiliate links. Just add Money Script to your site, and any links to advertisers websites, such as Booking.com or GetYourGuide, that are available in our affiliate network, will become affiliate links and earn income for every purchase.

⚠️ Please note: as of 2023, the Money Script tool has been replaced by LinkSwitcher.

This year, we managed to also release big, long-awaited updates of the Aviasales calendar widget and Hotellook hotel map widget. New widgets are more beautiful, convenient to use and can easily be integrated into websites. Last but not least, we released a beta-version of the Travelpayouts WordPress plugin. You can download it at this link for testing.

Education

This year, we’ve devoted much time to creating educational materials for affiliates. We run 24 webinars in English, launched the SEO Traffic Show with Jason Barnard and Tristam Jarman and released a few free PDFs.

Webinars

Here are some of the coolest webinars:

Travel blogging amidst the crisis: A live talk with SomtoSeeks.com. We ran this webinar at the very beginning of the pandemic. Travel lockdown confused many affiliates at first. We suggested them to focus on content creation, SEO and marketing, and ran a webinar with Somto Ugwueze, founder of somtoseeks.com, who shared thoughts on how to take your blog to the next level.
Advanced Tools at Travelpayouts. Aleksey Yanchuk and Polina Oparina, product managers at Travelpayouts, explained in detail how to use advanced affiliate solutions, such as White Label, API, the WordPress plugin, and the browser extension.
Travel traffic monetization: Tips for content creators. Nick Lazarev, Business Development Manager at Travelpayouts, shared industry statistics as well as relevant strategies. From the webinar, you’ll learn the best practices to monetize travel traffic, mistakes to avoid, as well as the most relevant affiliate offers and traffic formats that will help you get back in the affiliate game.

All the recordings are available on Events Travelpayouts.

SEO Traffic Show

In the SEO Traffic Show, Jason Barnard and Tristam Jarman picked affiliate sites apart and shared hands-on tips. You can watch all episodes of the show on our YouTube channel.

Free PDF-Books

In the very beginning of the pandemic, we released a PDF-book on how to survive during this challenging time and what to focus on while travel is on hold and corresponding content isn’t relevant.

A few more interesting PDFs:

The “Courses” Section in the User Dashboard

In the user dashboard of Travelpayouts, there is now a section with courses, which might be useful for affiliates. We are constantly extending the list with new training.

Antistress Meetups

Each year, we visit plenty of events across different countries and personally meet advertisers and affiliates. The pandemic put travel on pause, but it didn’t stop us from seeing our partners, even if we had to do it online via Zoom. Thus, we ran two antistress meetups where we discussed the current situation, plans, and problems. You can watch their recordings by the links below:

Travelpayouts Affiliate Summit 2020

This year, we held the Travelpayouts Affiliate Summit online and in English for the first time. The summit took five days and gathered over 20 amazing speakers, as well as plenty of useful content and hands-on tips.

Bryan Tighe and Laurie Tighe from Budget Your Trip shared their experience of promotion and monetization through WordPress blogs.
Farzad Rashidi from Visme shared how the team grew traffic from 0 to 1.5 million.
Darley Newman shared the secrets to successful video production.

You can watch all TPAS2020 webinars on our YouTube channel and read posts based on the webinars in our blog.

Travelpayouts Christmas Advent Calendar

Given all that happened this year, gift-giving time has been highly anticipated. That’s why we gathered an amazing Travelpayouts’ Advent Calendar with presents for everyone. By the way, you still can get some of them!

Travelpayouts Team

The sudden onset of the pandemic of COVID-19 forced us to mobilize and revise our plans for the year: we suspended hiring for 3 months, constantly monitored the market situation, and changed our strategy on the fly.

Despite the fact that travel almost stopped, we worked 3 times as much: we updated partner tools, generated a huge amount of useful content, looked for new advertisers, and changed and optimized processes within the team.

We did not lay off any of our employees and towards the summer months, we resumed hiring and invited 17 cool specialists in this year.

This year wasn’t easy for us. We are so used to meeting the whole company several times a year and the closure of the borders greatly saddened us. But we increased the number of Zoom meetings. We arranged a “coffee roulette” to drink coffee with random colleagues, held quizzes and Zoom bars with invited guests, and even celebrated the company’s birthday! On that day, some employees were still able to gather in the offices of Phuket, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, and remote employees received delicious cakes.

We really hope that next year we will have more meetings and travels and that we can finally personally meet at meetups with affiliates, and advertisers, and get together at TPAS2021 in the fall. Happy holidays! Thank you for being with us, and may next year be better than 2020 for us all!