The Kayak Affiliate Program is no longer available on Travelpayouts. Please check your tools. We recommend redirecting traffic to the CheapOair Affiliate Program.
Travelanddestinations.com | Mike Clegg
I’ve been traveling extensively since I was in my teens, and as I’ve gotten older (30’s now) I’ve been traveling more and more. I started my online journey through Instagram around five years ago.
Various friends suggested that I start a website, so I created www.travelanddestinations.com to share my experiences and tips with others. The website did start as more of a blog but has since evolved into more of a travel resource.
Since doing this, I now see my website as my main project and spend most of my free time working on it. I also run a very large Instagram account – @travelanddestinations, which goes hand in hand with my website.
The main objective of my site is to provide content that helps other travelers around the world. It is monetized so that I can invest in new content, tools and developments, and hopefully, one day live off the site, as well as travel more and continue sharing these types of articles with my readers.
The Niche Selection
Traveling has always been my biggest interest, and although super competitive in terms of organic search, I didn’t let that deter me. I write and produce content because that’s what I love doing. I would advise people to always write about their main interests, or else they will likely get bored after a while.
The main pitfall of the travel niche is that the web is now inundated with travel websites making it a fiercely competitive niche. That doesn’t mean you can’t succeed, but it does mean you’ll have to brush up on your SEO skills, do keyword research and work pretty hard to create articles that rank well and will bring you traffic. Organic traffic (i.e. from search engines) should definitely be one of your primary goals as it can provide a continuous and steady flow. The main thing is to not give up and to keep at it.
Affiliate Marketing
There are heaps of affiliate programs out there which I’ve tried, but for many of them, I haven’t really enjoyed the user interfaces. They also often have many non-travel programs, making it hard to find exactly what I’m after.
I feel like Travelpayouts picks and partners with a great selection of trustworthy brands, making them a good choice for travel blogs and websites. I am often checking to see what new offers and partnerships they have in case they would be good for my readers.
I generally sign up to offers that are relevant and that I can easily integrate into my site. Some of the others offers I use include:
- KAYAK – For offering cheap flight tickets to my audience all over the world.
- Omio – For traveling around Europe. I integrate these into Europe-related articles.
- Booking.com – Allows people to book hotels and other accommodations through text links, widgets and other mediums.
- Hostelworld – For referring readers to budget accommodations such as hostels.
Tips on Working With the Kayak Affiliate Program
I wanted a way to allow my visitors to read my articles and, once ready, search and book their flights. I like that the KAYAK program offers a range of solutions that I could integrate into my website. KAYAK is also a well known and trustworthy brand, and is related to Booking.com, which meant it would be a program I could definitely recommend to my readers.
To work effectively, you should utilize all the tools available for the KAYAK affiliate program such as links, banners and the search widget. Generally, I offer a search widget on relevant articles towards the end of the article and I’ve also programmed a custom footer button. All these tools have helped me make a regular income through the offer. Other ways that can work include text links where you could integrate them in relevant places that work well.
Try different tools and see what works best for you and gives your readers a good user experience.
To boost your income, you must improve your project. The following solutions will help you with this:
- Yoast – An excellent tool that provides info on your on-page SEO as well as readability. There is a free and paid version. Their blog is also great for learning more on SEO and writing.
- Backlinko – Run by Brian Dean, with detailed but very easy to prepare content, which is well structured and formatted.
- Grammarly – Add this to Chrome and it’ll check your spelling and grammar. It’s a fantastic tool which helps prevent typos.
You’ll find more suggestions on my web resource page.
Mejorepocapara.net | Miguel Angel Perez Oña
I knew that I wanted to write about one of my hobbies, and my most important hobby is traveling. At the same time, I wanted to do a website that could help people. I started to think about the troubles and steps that I always take when I travel by myself. When I want to go to any place in the world, I first look at the time of year with the best weather, what is cheaper, etc… and this is why I’ve chosen to write travel tips in the travel niche.
Affiliate Marketing
I want to have an extra income with my website and Travelpayouts offers a wide range of available affiliate programs, while providing easy tools to help and at the same time. For now, I am working with the following affiliate programs:
I think that Booking.com is a good choice for the extra earnings, but on my project, the Booking.com performance is worse than KAYAK. Booking.com has a higher cancelation rate, which is why you need more traffic to earn the same amount of money as with KAYAK.
Together with the affiliate programs, I monetize the project with the Google Adsense. I have a good performance with contextual ads, and for now, it’s the main source of income. My project has a good CTR and CPC, so this income source is the most important for us. Google AdSense generates more than 50% of our income.
Tips on Working With the Kayak Affiliate Program
The KAYAK affiliate program performs very well on my site, so I am very happy to work with the offer. My website focuses on the best times to travel. It helps with the first steps of planning a trip to any place – they search for when the best time to travel is, and see how much a flight costs to this place. This why KAYAK fits perfectly into my website. I am also very happy with KAYAK because it’s an all-in-one tool for any traveler. I think is the best affiliate program for my site.
It’s important to know what kind of traffic you have. You have to catch the people who are just starting to plan their travels. For example, if the visitor is searching for “what to do in the Bahamas,” they’ve most likely booked flight tickets and now wants to know what to do when he arrives to the Bahamas. In this case, KAYAK’s flight search box will not help your visitor. You could earn well from the visitors who is looking for an answer to the question, “When should I go to the Bahamas” or “Why travel to the Bahamas.” Those people have more chances to buy the tickets, since they are just planning their trip.
Heretotravel.com | Matt Morelli
Our website started in 2007 as a private travelogue on Tumblr. I was visiting Switzerland for the first time and getting there on my very first flight. I wanted to document the trip, so that I could savor every part of it. I was traveling alone and I thought it would give me something to do in the absence of having someone to talk to.
It turned out that I had a knack for writing and photography and my little blog became very popular, gaining over 60,000 followers very quickly. As the popularity grew, so did my ambition to grow the blog even more and reap the rewards from an active readership.
Today, I run the website with my wife. I now have someone to see the world with and therefore don’t need to be distracted from being alone on my travels. Despite this, my passion to write about travel has not diminished and neither has my ambition to keep growing.
The Niche Selection
Our niche includes less frequently explored places. Over the past few years, we have become increasingly frustrated with crowds when we visit major attractions and destinations. In reaction to this, we started visiting less well known and up-and-coming destinations and found that we enjoyed our visits to these places much more. With “over-tourism” becoming an increasing concern, we decided to switch our focus and concentrate on unearthing less frequently explored places to our readers.
One of the main pitfalls of concentrating all of our attention of less frequently explored places is that we are catering to a much smaller market than those focusing on the major tourist destinations. As such, there are fewer web searches and fewer travel options to offer our readers. There is a gradual improvement in both of these areas though.
We focus heavily on producing really helpful articles with strong SEO, so most of the resources we use are about improving SEO and adapting to technological change. Neil Patel is consistently useful and makes everything sound so easy, even if it isn’t necessarily. Brian Dean is also an expert in SEO and has fantastic guides to getting backlinks.
Affiliate Marketing
CPA affiliate programs and display advertising are the primary sources of income from the website. We also earn a little from monetization of videos and our new podcast. Going forward, we’ll be looking at selling downloadable travel guide ebooks directly from our website.
I was first attracted to Travelpayouts by the White Label flight and hotel search engines. It’s such a unique product and a great way to seamlessly convert readers into buyers. Over the past year or two, I’ve noticed the Travelpayouts team working hard to grow the list of affiliate offers from big-name travel brands. It’s fabulous to have all these brands in one place, making it really easy to insert contextual widgets and links into my content.
I’ve worked with a couple of different flight search providers over the years, but KAYAK is my favorite. The most important thing for me is how useful a tool it is to my readers, so that’s what I primarily look at when choosing who to work with. I use Kayak personally when searching for flights, so it’s easy to recommend them in my content.
Firstly, KAYAK is easy to use and looks great. The design can make or break an online service and KAYAK’s design language is bold and clear. Secondly, the search engine is powerful and it’s easy to unearth some great flight deals. In addition to this, KAYAK shows users the complete fare, including baggage fees. Not all flight search engines do this.
Of course, I would be lying if I didn’t also consider the affiliate reward when choosing flight providers. Thankfully, the KAYAK reward offer is one of the highest in the market, currently 50% of the advertiser’s revenue from each booking.
As well as KAYAK, we really like working with Omio and Viator. Omio is a service I’m keeping a very close eye on as they expand beyond their European offering. As I mentioned before, I only refer my readers to services I really like myself, and Omio is one of those services. The site is really nicely designed and very easy to use. I really like how it simultaneously displays search results for buses, trains and flights on the same page. It’s a really good service for finding more minor routes, particularly bus routes in less explored countries.
Viator is the king of experiences, attractions and day trips, so I was really pleased to find out they had joined Travelpayouts. There are many online travel agents offering a very similar service to Viator, but I tend to find Viator has the widest selection of offers.
Tips on Working With the Kayak Affiliate Program
I’ve implemented KAYAK’s offer in a variety of ways in my content. By far the best performing is the widget, though. What I really like about the widget is that you can set the form to be pre-filled with the destination so that it is contextual. The “Origin” field is also prefilled according to the reader’s location, so users only need to click one button to instantly see personalized flight search results. There’s almost no friction in converting readers into buyers and you’re providing a genuinely useful service to your readers. Awesome!
The widget itself is great as it is and super easy to implement. To make it even easier though, you could do what I did and create a custom WordPress shortcode. This is a much easier way to set up than I expected and it makes inserting the widget into our content ridiculously easy.
One more tip… think carefully about where you place the widget. I always try to place the KAYAK widget in amongst my “Getting There” content. If I’m already writing about how to get to a destination, it’s logical that I would then link to a flight search engine. This creates a nice flow and meets the needs of my readers.
