Affiliate marketing for travel has become one of the main ways we monetise CheckinAway. Like many bloggers, we originally had no idea how to make money blogging and spent a lot of time learning how travel affiliate programs and affiliate links actually work.

In this article, we share our honest experience of using Travelpayouts over the past few years, including how we use affiliate links, widgets and Travelpayouts Drive to monetise CheckinAway, what has worked well for us, and what we think could be improved.

Introduction

Affiliate marketing has become one of the main ways we monetise our blog CheckinAway. Like many bloggers, we started by looking at individual affiliate programmes and quickly realised how difficult it would have been to manage multiple dashboards, payment schedules and reporting systems.

After considering different options, we decided to use Travelpayouts. We have now been using it since 2022 and it has become one of the core parts of our travel blog monetisation strategy.

Here is our personal experience of using the platform, what we like, what frustrates us, and whether we think it is worth using if you are building a travel blog.

How to Make Money Blogging with Travel Affiliate Programs

If you’re researching how to make money blogging, travel affiliate marketing is one of the most accessible places to start. Instead of creating your own products, you can recommend hotels, tours and travel services through affiliate links and earn a commission when readers make a booking.

To do this, we use Travelpayouts and have provided more information about our experience below.

What is Travelpayouts?

Travelpayouts is an affiliate marketplace built for travel creators and publishers. Rather than applying to and managing multiple affiliate programmes separately, it allows you to access and manage a wide range of travel brands from a single platform.

At the time of writting this, there are 58 travel programs. The marketplace is organised across several travel categories, including:

• Accommodation and hotels
• Flights
• Tours and activities
• Car and bike rentals
• Transfers and Airport Services
• Trians and buses
• Insurance
• eSIMs
• Cruises
• Other travel services and experiences

From a practical perspective, the platform provides:

• One dashboard to manage multiple affiliate programmes
• Centralised reporting and performance tracking
• A single payment system for many partners
• Tools for creating affiliate links and widgets

For us, this streamlined approach reduces administration and allows us to spend more time creating travel content.

Why We Chose Travelpayouts

Our personal experience

We joined Travelpayouts in 2022, about a year after launching CheckinAway. At the time, we were trying to understand how do bloggers make money from blogging and quickly realised that managing lots of separate affiliate accounts could be a job in itself.

Like many beginners, we started looking at individual travel brands and their affiliate programmes. The more we researched, the more overwhelming it became. Every programme had its own application process, payment terms, minimum payout threshold and reporting dashboard. Managing multiple accounts felt like a lot of work for a small blog.

When we discovered Travelpayouts, it felt like a no-brainer. Instead of dealing with dozens of separate platforms, we could join multiple travel affiliate programmes through a single portal, use one login and track everything from one dashboard.

No time to read now?

No worries! Save on Pinterest to read it later.

Save to Pinterest →

As our blog has grown, we have become much more intentional about affiliate marketing. When we publish or update an article, we think about where useful affiliate links or widgets can genuinely help our readers plan their trips.

Don’t get us wrong, we are not earning huge amounts from affiliate marketing. However, the income we generate through Travelpayouts covers the costs of running the blog, pays for some of the tools we use and even leaves a little extra that we can reinvest into future travels and creating new content.

We are also members of a few other affiliate programmes, but when it comes to travel-related brands, Travelpayouts offers by far the widest and most convenient selection. For us, having everything in one place has made managing affiliate partnerships much simpler.

How Do Bloggers Make Money from Blogging?

One of the questions we get asked most often is how do bloggers make money from blogging. In reality, there is rarely a single income source. Many travel creators combine display advertising, sponsored content, digital products and travel affiliate marketing.

For us, affiliate marketing has become one of the most sustainable options because it allows us to recommend products and services that we already use ourselves.

How We Actually Use Travelpayouts

Travelpayouts gives us access to a wide range of travel affiliate programs, allowing us to recommend hotels, tours, transport and travel services from one platform.

Accommodation

Accommodation is by far one of the biggest affiliate opportunities for our blog. Many of our destination guides, itineraries and travel planning articles include recommendations on where to stay, so adding relevant hotel links feels natural and genuinely useful for our readers.

The programmes we use most often are Booking.com and Trip.com, depending on the destination and the type of accommodation we are recommending.

Activities and experiences

Another major part of our affiliate strategy is tours, attractions and local experiences. Our travel guides often feature the best things to do in a destination, making this one of the easiest ways to add value while monetising our content.

We mainly use affiliate links from GetYourGuide, Klook and Trip.com for activities, day trips and attraction tickets.

Travel and transport

Many of our articles also help readers plan how to get around, especially when travelling across Europe or Asia. For this reason, we regularly include affiliate links for train travel and flights, with Trip.com being our most commonly used partner in this category.

eSIMs and travel services

We are also part of affiliate programmes for travel services such as Airalo for eSIMs and Radical Storage for luggage storage.

While these products fit well within our travel resource pages and destination guides, they are not as profitable for us as accommodation and activities. Even so, they provide useful solutions for our readers and complement the rest of our travel content.

The Travelpayouts Tools We Use

Another thing we really like about Travelpayouts is the variety of tools on offer. Depending on how you want to monetise your blog, you can use:

• Affiliate links
• Widgets
• White Label solutions
• APIs
• Data files
• The WordPress plugin
• The Travelpayouts Chrome extension

To be completely honest, we haven’t tried them all yet, but the ones we do use have become an important part of our workflow.

Affiliate links (deep links)

This is the tool we use the most and where the majority of our affiliate income comes from. Learning how to create affiliate links was one of the first monetisation skills we developed, and over time we have also learned how to promote affiliate links naturally without disrupting the reader experience.

We regularly create deep links to specific hotels, tours, attractions and travel services, placing them naturally within our destination guides and travel planning articles. For us, simple text links often feel more helpful and less intrusive than banners or adverts, and they fit seamlessly into the way we write.

Widgets

We are still experimenting with widgets, but so far they seem to work really well for certain types of articles, especially destination-specific guides. For example, we have had good results using them on our A Day Trip from Bucharest to Slănic Salt Mine: A Unique Underground Adventure article, where readers are actively looking for practical travel information.

While we don’t use widgets everywhere, they can be a great addition to planning pages where visitors are ready to book accommodation, tours or transport.

The Travelpayouts Chrome Extension

For the past year, the Travelpayouts Chrome extension has been one of my best friends. It has made creating affiliate links much quicker and simpler, saving a huge amount of time when updating existing articles or publishing new content.

Instead of constantly switching between browser tabs and dashboards, I can generate affiliate links much more efficiently. It is one of those small tools that has had a surprisingly big impact on our day-to-day blogging workflow, and I absolutely love it.

Travelpayouts Drive

Drive is the newest feature from Travelpayouts and essentially brings together many of the platform’s automation tools into one place. Rather than being a single feature, it is a collection of tools designed to help bloggers optimise their content and increase affiliate revenue with less manual work.

The current Drive features include:

• Content Analytics – shows detailed statistics on clicks, conversions and earnings from Drive and other Travelpayouts tools.
• Show Targeted Offers – detects when a visitor is ready to book and displays a relevant travel offer in a background tab.
• Switch Links to Travelpayouts – finds links to travel brand websites in your content and converts them into Travelpayouts affiliate links.
• Link Relevant Keywords – automatically detects travel-related keywords and turns them into affiliate links.
• Insert Recommendations – adds contextual recommendation blocks that fit naturally within your articles.
• Display Smart Previews – shows a small preview with additional information when users hover over travel-related links.

One thing we really appreciate about Drive is that it is highly customisable. Not every feature works for every blog, and thankfully you can decide which tools to enable, disable or even exclude from specific pages.

In all fairness, not all of the Drive features work for us, but we like that we can tailor the experience to suit our website rather than being forced to use everything.

Our Experience Using Drive

Content Analytics

This is still a fairly new feature for us, so we need more time before drawing any firm conclusions. However, our first impressions are very positive.

We like that it allows us to drill down into what is actually working across the blog, showing which pages, tools and affiliate placements are generating clicks, conversions and income. As we continue to optimise older content, we think this could become one of the most useful parts of Drive.

Show Targeted Offers

We were quite sceptical about this feature at first, but we can definitely see the benefits.

Targeted Offers detects when a visitor appears ready to book and opens a relevant travel offer in a background tab. We understand that some readers may find this slightly annoying, but in all fairness we have seen an increase in sales since enabling it.

One of the biggest advantages is that it can monetise articles that do not naturally contain many affiliate links. For example, our How to Explore Xingping from Yangshuo in One Day article is more informational than transactional, yet we have recently seen bookings generated through Targeted Offers that probably would not have happened otherwise.

The downside is that bookings made through Targeted Offers usually earn a reduced commission. For example:

• Trip.com Hotels: 2.75% instead of 5.5%
• GetYourGuide: 4% instead of 8%
• Klook: 2.5% instead of 5%

For lower-monetising articles, we are happy to accept the reduced commission because some affiliate income is better than none.

However, on our most popular articles that already contain plenty of affiliate links and widgets, such as Things to Do in Beijing or Things to Do in Shanghai, it can be frustrating when readers book through a reduced-commission Targeted Offer instead of using the affiliate links already included in the article.

Support CheckinAway

Add us as a preferred source on Google

It helps our guides show up more often when you search.

Add now

→

Link Relevant Keywords

We actually used this feature for about a year before deciding to switch it off.

While it worked as intended, we felt that too many words and phrases became hyperlinked, and the destination pages were not always contextually useful for our readers. We generally prefer to control where affiliate links appear, so manual linking works better for our style of content.

Switch Links to Travelpayouts

This is one feature we have not used.

We cloak and manage our affiliate links manually, so we do not currently need an automatic link-switching tool. However, we can see how it could save a lot of time for bloggers who already link directly to travel brands throughout their content.

Insert Recommendations

This has actually been one of our favourite Drive features.

The recommendation blocks blend surprisingly well with our blog design and often feel like a natural extension of the article rather than an obvious advertising element. We have seen some good results from the automatically inserted hotel recommendations and would definitely recommend giving this feature a try.

Display Smart Previews

This is probably our least favourite feature.

When readers hover over a link, a preview box appears with additional information. While some bloggers may find this useful, we personally feel that it makes the page look a little too busy and distracts from the reading experience.

That said, this is very much a matter of personal preference and we can see why other websites might like it.

What we like about Drive

• Combines multiple automation tools in one place
• Highly customisable with the ability to enable or disable individual features
• You can exclude specific pages if needed
• Helps identify new monetisation opportunities
• Content Analytics provides useful insights into what drives affiliate income
• Targeted Offers can generate bookings on articles with few natural affiliate opportunities
• Insert Recommendations integrates well with our content and has performed well
• Saves time when optimising older articles

What we don’t like about Drive

• Not every feature suits every type of blog
• Some automation tools can feel too intrusive
• Targeted Offers can reduce commissions on articles that already monetise well
• Link Relevant Keywords can create too many hyperlinks
• Display Smart Previews make pages feel busier than we would like
• We still prefer to manually control important affiliate placements

Our verdict

For us, Drive is best viewed as a toolkit rather than an all-or-nothing solution.

Some features have become a valuable part of our workflow, while others simply do not fit the way we run our blog. The good news is that Travelpayouts gives you enough flexibility to customise everything to your own preferences.

We see Drive as a helpful assistant that can improve monetisation and save time, but not as a replacement for creating high-quality content and manually optimising the pages that matter most.

The Travelpayouts Affiliate Program

Besides earning from bookings, Travelpayouts also offers a referral programme for bloggers. If you are trying to earn money with blogging, referral programmes can become an additional income stream alongside traditional affiliate commissions.

If you use our referral link, or if you later refer other bloggers through your own link, there is currently an opportunity to earn up to $100 in bonuses, distributed as follows:

• Sign up and install Travelpayouts Drive: +$25
• Earn your first $100 in affiliate commissions: +$25
• Reach $1,000 in total earnings: +$50

If you’re serious about growing a travel blog, this is the platform we would choose again. It takes just a few minutes to create a free account, and new users can unlock up to $100 in bonus rewards as they get started.

👉 Start using Travelpayouts here: join Travelpayout via our affiliate link

Is Travelpayouts Good for New Bloggers?

Yes, if:

• You are starting a travel blog.
• You want one dashboard.
• You don’t want to manage dozens of accounts.
• You want to monetise destination guides.

Maybe not, if:

• You only work with one travel brand.
• You want maximum control over every affiliate relationship.
• You prefer managing direct partnerships.

Frequently Asked Questions

Final Thoughts

After using Travelpayouts for several years, it has become an important part of how we monetise CheckinAway. Having access to a wide range of travel affiliate programmes through a single platform has simplified our workflow and allowed us to focus more on creating useful travel content rather than managing multiple affiliate accounts.

That said, it is not a perfect solution. We still prefer to manually optimise our most important articles, and there are some features and reporting tools that we would like to see improved. For us, platforms like Travelpayouts Drive are helpful assistants, but they do not replace a thoughtful content strategy or a good user experience.

Overall, our experience has been positive. If you are a travel blogger looking for an easy way to start or streamline your affiliate marketing efforts, we think Travelpayouts is well worth considering—especially if, like us, you value having many travel affiliate opportunities managed from one dashboard.