The Best Practices of the Successful booking.com Affiliates

Andrey Novoselov Andrey Novoselov
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Reading time:  3  min.
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Last year, Travelpayouts held the very first travel affiliate event — Travelpayouts Affiliate Summit. One of the speakers — Ekaterina Rakova (Booking.com), presented the best practices of the successful affiliates. This information is extremely valuable for webmasters who want to know about the people making thousands of dollars monthly on online travel market and how they are doing it.

Booking.com - best practices

Placement of Widgets and Other Tools

Placement of advertising materials on the website is influencing on the total income. Use below tips to find the best place:

  • Do not hide the widget deep in the navigation menu. You cannot expect a high conversion if it is hard to get to the element.
  • Do not put widgets and banners at the very bottom of the page. Content on the page is certainly important, but if you also need a conversion, tools should be placed higher.
  • Do not hide the widget in a personal account or locked part of the website, which is available just after signing in. Each additional field that the client must fill before getting the results irritates the person and cause losing the client.
  • Do not make the client think he should not look for where and how to book. The client should see «the big red button» at the moment when he is ready to make a reservation.

All fields must be autocomplete as much as possible. If you know where the customer is going to go – fill in automatically. You know the dates, at least approximately, — autocomplete. Your aim is to reduce client’s steps and required actions. However, do not limit the choice of the user. It is important to do most of the work for the client, but do not think for them.

Own Audience

All TOP affiliates have their own audience. This is not a random traffic that suddenly comes to their sites. These are people who know exactly where and why they are going, what they are looking for, and when they have a desire to book a hotel, tour, and other products — the webmaster should give them this opportunity.

Traffic of the successful webmasters belongs to the ‘Qualified’ category. This means that the cancellation rate for their reservations is generally lower than the average for the local market.

Learn the Statistics

Partners with high incomes look at the statistics several times. They research it.

Booking Statistics

It does not matter if you generate 100 reservations or 1000; you need to understand very deeply what is happening inside the project.

Learn the average price of the reservation. Thanks to it, you will be able to optimize the marketing strategy based on what gives the maximum profit; for example, a business trip or vacation. Also, it will allow:

  • Prioritize the directions;
  • Deeply assess the results of the work;
  • Understand the market trends.

Pay attention to the gap between the day of the booking and the day of the journey (check-in day), this is called — Booking Windows. On average, the gap between booking and check-in can be from 2 to 6 weeks. It is a great database for your content-plan or email-marketing.

You have to examine your situation, and you will understand with a very high accuracy when to sell, for whom and which destinations. Moreover, you will know exactly what the impact of this is to be expected.

Booking.com is one of the most known services to book accommodation around the world. Also, it has one of the best hotel affiliate program. Travelpayouts affiliate program allows you to offer your visitors the hotel comparison service — Hotellook.com, and earn on it. Your visitors will be able to compare the prices on different reservation systems, also on booking.com (not available on White Labels!), and this is a way to provide a good service for your audience and, at the same time, make money on it. Join the program, if you are still not with us.