Recruiting Affiliates in Travel

Finding and engaging with new affiliates

2020 has been a particularly cruel year for the travel industry. In a recent webinar on recruiting affiliates in the travel vertical, Chris Tradgett shared some recent feedback on the challenges and opportunities facing this sector as we head into 2021. This was based on conversations with publishers and advertisers in the travel vertical gave some valuable insights.

WHAT HAPPENED?

Through 2020 so far, digital adspend tanked; in the US spend in the travel vertical was down 41% year on year. Air travel dropped by 90% – so this has had a catastrophic impact not only on travel but the entire engineering infrastructure that serves the airline sector.

Many advertisers pause their affiliate programs or reduced commissions – sometimes to 0%! The more extreme such as Mariott, actually closed down their affiliate activity, leading to affiliate links going to network 404 pages. For a channel that is paid only on performance – actual sales, this is bizarre and not easily justified.

WHAT ABOUT THE AFFILIATES?

Guillaume of @MilesAddict noted that at the start of lockdown, he lost 70-80% of all website traffic. His revenues were even worse hit, and he reported losing 95% of revenue.

We heard much the same story directly from Colin of Weather2Travel, a leading UK travel content affiliate. You can read more direct ‘from the horse’s mouth’ in the recent Publisher Spotlight on Weather2Travel.

Most affiliates have been agile and adapted with new content for the changed travel scene. MilesAddict went one further in pivoting to a whole new area, as Chris shared.

WHY’S THE TIME RIGHT FOR RECRUITING?

In the webinar, Chris gave more detail on the issues. He argued that this is an ideal time for recruiting travel affiliates. Affiliates hit by the double whammy of reduced revenues and closed programs are looking for new opportunities.

The arduous task of identifying affiliates in your own vertical and engaging with them, is telescoped to make recruiting simple. As one user has described it: “Publisher Discovery is a game changer for affiliate recruitment.” 

Chris talked through how simple the process is in Publisher Discovery. The search below, filtered by vertical and country shows a target list of Spanish travel sites, took only seconds to load. You can be recruiting new travel affiliates in next to no time! Give it a go yourself.

See more on how to find travel affiliates in Finding Travel Affiliates. You can hear more from the session in the recording of the webinar…

View the Recording