You can make serious money in the travel niche if you understand what it takes. One of the companies that can let this idea see the light of the day is Expedia. It is one of the best travel-related affiliate networks since it offers competitive commission rates, a wide range of affiliate tools, and is pretty easy to join.
Expedia Affiliate Program
Types of products: Broad range of travel booking products.
Where to join: Expedia Affilaite Page
Commission structure: 5-6%
Cookie length: 30 days
Payment Methods: Paypal, bank Transfer
Expedia is a huge brand with deep market trust. This is a great foundation for an affiliate program. Some of the questions this article will explore are …
How can you apply to be an Expedia affiliate?
What are their commission rates?
How best can you promote your offers?
You will get answers to all these in this post.
Expedia Sites & Products
Expedia.com is a website owned and operated by a US-based Expedia group, a global travel technology company. Besides Expedia, the company owns other smaller companies such as hotels.com, trivago, hotwire.com, Classic Vacations, etc.
Check them out.
With a presence in about 33 countries and more than 25 languages, the company is one of the best travel booking websites in the world. It allows travelers to source for travel-related deals such as hotels, cars, Flights, Vacation Rentals, Cruises, Rewards, Collections, among other deals.
As an affiliate, you can promote their offers and earn a commission whenever someone purchases those offers through your affiliate link.
How to Join the Expedia Affiliate Program
If you want to join Expedia as one of their affiliates, you can apply via Commission Junction. CJ is a global online affiliate network with over 3,000 merchants and 15 offices around the world. Publicis Groupe owns the website – A Santa Barbara-based company established about 20 years ago.
It’s easy to create an account in CJ; all you need is to sign up with your first and second name, email, and password.
You will then verify your email, read and accept their legal terms (most affiliates skip this part), and confirm your payment details. These steps are essential since it helps them to know who you are and pay you whenever you earn a commission.
There isn’t as much info on the Expedia affiliate landing page. But once you sign in using CJ, you will be able to read all the information regarding their affiliate program.
One of the things you will realize in their terms is that they have a 7-day action referral period. Guess what that means? Let’s say, for example, Sarah, a traveler, clicks on your affiliate link, lands on the landing page, and later leaves intending to check out later.
If she decided to purchase the offer before seven days are over, you would earn a commission since the cookies are still active.
Go to our affiliate programs page for more program reviews.
Program Commission Rates and Rules
You should definitely be okay promoting Expedia affiliate offers. The company has a global presence with over 19 million reviews. So, you can trust them.
But how much can you averagely make as an Expedia affiliate? Well, it all depends on the kind of offers you are promoting. There are more than five categories with more than 400,000 properties, and 650,000 deals with competitive rates.
Here are the payouts for each category:
- 5% on destinations services
- $20 to $30 on cruises
- 4% for airline bookings
- 2% on car rentals
- 5.5% to 6% on hotel rooms
They can increase their rates if they notice an excellent performance on your side.
Once you reach $50 on affiliate commission, which is pretty easy to hit with targeted traffic, they will pay you either by cheque or direct bank transfer.
Expedia Affiliate Tools and Support
As an Expedia affiliate, you will have access to a bunch of affiliate tools at your disposal. You can choose to promote any offer with these:
Banners
You also have access to different banners as an Expedia affiliate. If you have a blog, you may want different sizes of banners for the header, sidebar, or footer to optimize conversions. In the dashboard, you can choose any banners size you want.
A tracking code is embedded in each banner. So, anytime someone clicks on it and purchases the offer you are promoting, you will earn a commission.
Widget
Expedia provides a search widget that you can integrate into your blog sidebar.
API
An effective application programming interface integration makes it easy for affiliates. It gives real-time information such that you can always know when someone clicks on your affiliate link and makes a purchase. It also allows you to access data regarding the offers you are promoting and download it in any format.
Imagine the levels of transparency if there was no API integration.
Text links
You can also choose to go with text links. Just create an article relating to the product you are promoting and insert your affiliate link in the body of the article. It has to be a valuable article for someone to click the link and check out the offer.
If you don’t have a blog, you can begin blogging on free sites such as medium or Quora. Take note that Expedia doesn’t allow promotion on Facebook or Twitter.
White label
Once you become an Expedia affiliate, you can choose to hand your customers over to Expedia to handle all their details or allow booking right there on your site. White label means you can promote the offer on your site as if it’s yours.
There are some more tools. And to ensure you don’t miss out on any of their exciting offers, Expedia regularly sends emails regarding some of their latest deals to their affiliates.
Despite its positive global reputation and competitive affiliate rates, Expedia has several shortcomings, too. Here are some of them:
Pros and Cons of Expedia Affiliate Program
ADVANTAGES
- Allows affiliates from all over the world: Unlike sites such as Clickbank, which only allows affiliates from selected countries, Commission Junction allows affiliates worldwide. You only need to sign up as an affiliate on Commission Junction, apply to be an Expedia affiliate, and get your affiliate link. One mistake most affiliates make, however, is not taking time to craft a good application note to get accepted as an Expedia affiliate.
- It has achieved global recognition: You can leverage the trust people already have on Expedia to earn money as an affiliate. It’s easier for someone to purchase offers on Expedia than on any other strange site. If your statement is, “book your next flight on Expedia,” the traveler would most likely click on the link since Expedia is a known travel brand.
- Many affiliate marketing tools: Choose between banners, text links, or go the white label way. Besides, the highly customized API integration allows easy access to affiliate data to draw insights on how to boost your affiliate sales.
DISADVANTAGES
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- Some offers are expensive: You will only make money when someone purchases your affiliate offers. But if the offers are costly, not many people will make the purchase. So, it’s worth choosing offers that your target audience can afford.
- No payment for repeat sales: If a customer makes a repeated purchase, you will not earn a commission. That doesn’t go well with most affiliates since most feel that they invested a great deal on acquiring that particular customer.
- Like any affiliate program Expedia can decide to block you suddenly from their affiliate network if they realize you are sending poor traffic.
- Expedia doesn’t allow promotions on Facebook and Twitter. Imagine if you could easily leverage the trust from Facebook friends and earn commissions.
Conclusion
You can easily make money promoting Expedia offers. But to rise to the top of the file, you need to have a defined traffic source. Launching a travel blog is, by far, the most effective way to make money on Expedia. You can also try vlogging. There are lots of travel vloggers getting good figures promoting travel-related offers.
Whichever the case, always offer value to your audience. Good marketing is one that makes the customer feel smart. Start your affiliate journey by joining the worldly renowned Expedia affiliate network.
