Expedia Affiliate Program
If you are thinking about getting into the travel affiliate niche, Expedia is among the most established affiliate programs across the web. The site allows you to search for travel deals related to flights, hotels, vacations, and more. Here is an exclusive guide to the Expedia commission structure, what you can promote, and how you can make money with this affiliate program.
What is Expedia?
Before we dive more into Expedia Affiliate program, let’s get some basics about Expedia right. Expedia is one of the most popular travel booking websites in the world. Expedia website is possessed by Expedia Group, which is a worldwide travel technology company based in U.S. Expedia provides services in 33 countries, in more than 25 languages. Other than Expedia.com, other websites operated by the Expedia group include; Hotels.com, Orbitz, trivago, CheapTickets, Classic Vacations, Venere.com, CarRentals.com, SilverRail, HomeAway and Travelocity.
Expedia Affiliate Program
The Expedia Affiliate program operates within the CJ Affiliate network. Affiliates are free to join the on CJ Affiliate network. The landing page has no information about the program, and you can only find the read through its terms on the CJ Affiliate. It is not always the best thing when affiliate network programs do not disclose their information on their affiliate landing pages. New affiliates thinking about joining the affiliate program should consider joining the CJ Affiliate network to find out the structure of the commission.
Once you have an account on the CJ Affiliate, you can see that they have a 7-day referral period, which is not that bad for a travel booking affiliate program. As an Expedia affiliate, you will get weekly newsletters with seasonal offers and seasonal offers. Expedia also offers you with dynamic widgets and search forms. This will enable you to generate links to any city for flights, hotels, and vacation packages. Under the Expedia affiliate program terms, it outlines that affiliates should not promote Expedia through Twitter and Facebook. It does not indicate other social media platforms, but it is best if you would contact Expedia via the CJ platform for clarification about other social media sites.
What They Pay
the affiliate program is legit and can earn you some cash. The current 30-day EPC (earnings per one hundred clicks) is $30 over days and $3.14 over 7 days. The program provides a 7-day action referral period. This means that if any of your users convert within the 7 days of clicking, you will be paid on it. Any fraudulent transactions will be reversed, and the publisher will not receive a commission.
Expedia Affiliate Program Commission
The commission ranges from 2% to 6%. The highest 6% Expedia commission is for cruise bookings. The lowest commission is 2 %, mostly for car rentals and hotel bookings. All the commissions are paid upon completed transactions or stay. No commission is attributed to the booking until it is complete as a confirmed stay. Expedia.ca does not pay commission on pre-packaged vacations. The commissions pay as follows;
• 2% on car rentals
• 4% for airline bookings
• 5% on destinations services
• 5.5-6 % on hotel rooms
• $20- $30 on cruises
How to Promote Them
Expedia has a dedicated affiliate team that offers options for promoting and integrating travel on blogs and websites. Expedia features a variety of categories that you can promote. Some of the affiliate programs to promote include; Cars, Hotels, Cruises, Flights, Discover, Things to Do, Deals, Vacation Rentals, Rewards, and Collections. The affiliate program allows online creators to maximize and monetize their traffic. You can promote the Expedia brand by featuring links on your website to sales, inventory, and promotions.
Expedia negotiates with the suppliers directly to secure inventory access that includes rates and packages. With the brand claiming to have leading conversion rates, every qualifying transaction that is done via a link gives you a certain percentage of the revenue varying from 2% to 12%. All partners have access to data feeds, software tools, storefronts, and technology that will help them to connect their business to millions of travelers who would like to get to you. These payments are made monthly through bank transfer. Some of the suggested Expedia business types range from personal blogs covering travel topics to agencies that assist travelers in finding their perfect vacation or getting at their business appointment in a timely fashion.
What You Can’t Promote
Looking at the terms within CJ.com, the list of what is excluded from promotion to earn a commission is quite confusing. We would best recommend that you contact Expedia through the affiliate contact indicated in CJ for more clarification about what is eligible for commissions and what is not. For instance, they have stated that Expendia.ca does not pay for commissions on pre-packaged vacations. Also, any car that exceeds a purchase of $5000 will be considered a non-commissionable transaction.
How People Can Make Money with The Expedia Affiliate Program
By now, you should be aware that travel booking affiliate programs are very competitive. To be successful in earning you should treat your travel affiliate website like a website rather like a leisure time activity. Most of the travel blogger affiliates place the booking search form in a sidebar or create a webpage for it called ‘Book Accommodation’ or ‘Cheap Tickets’ and include its in their navigation. Although it’s the easiest way, this is the worst approach. People won’t use the search form on your site because if that what they wanted to do, they would go to Expedia or another travel site directly. This approach doesn’t simply work.
The majority of people will visit your travel website to search for a particular inspiration or information. Therefore, the best strategy to make money with the Expedia affiliate program is using your Expedia affiliate links in the article’s body. Most of the travel bloggers only use the search form, failing to do this. You will be surprised by how much traffic this can earn you. So, let’s get this clear, use the affiliate links in your articles only.
Regardless of the affiliate program you are working on; you should always spend a reasonable amount of time researching the keywords. When it comes to this competitive travel niche, you need to find low competition keywords to get boosted traffic on your site. However, finding these low competition keywords for travel bloggers is not much of a challenge; the problem comes in writing high-quality articles around them. For typical bloggers who write about places they have been to, it will be difficult to find low competitive keywords for your particular trip.
However, if your primary aim to join the Expedia Affiliate program is making money, it will be easier to find leas competitive keywords by writing about places that you have not personally visited. But this might expose you to issues with coming up with a quality article making your articles to be generic as you haven’t been in those places. You need to style and make it look like your real experience for the readers to take your recommendations seriously and increase your conversion rate. So, what is the best thing to do in your travel blog monetization? Join other similar programs and incorporate the links that you would recommend and those appropriate in your article content. You will often find keywords with low competition while you won’t find them sometimes.
Some of the articles that have the potential of high conversion rates are detailed itineraries. If your site visitors decide to use your itinerary, they will most probably want to use the same accommodation as you. There is also a higher probability that they will book more than one hotel you have recommended incase they follow your itinerary entirely.
Another way in which people can make money with Expedia is by utilizing videos. Travel vlogging is becoming more and more popular, with the majority of people preferring to consume travel content via videos rather than written content. You can try and describe your itinerary through a YouTube video and then place the links of the hotels you used in the video in the Video description. This way, you can be almost sure to get higher conversion rates.
It is not recommendable for you to promote Expedia if you are not a travel blogger, and you want to own a travel affiliate site. You can easily earn a commission from booking affiliate programs as a travel blogger than an owner of a generic travel website. But if you still want to create your own travel affiliate website, we advise you to try a target one type of traveler or write about one destination. For instance, you can create high-quality content focusing only on traveling to Thailand or target only the luxury travelers. This way, people will perceive you as an authority or expert for those looking for a luxury vacation in Thailand and will trust your recommendations.
Expedia Travel Agent Affiliate Program
The laws of the United States have incorporated travel agencies that apply for the Expedia travel agent affiliate program. The program enables you to provide your clients with better rates than what they are given by the program and earns commission. The commission for the Expedia travel agent affiliate program is higher than that for the affiliate program. This commission ranges from 3% to 11%. If the travel agency becomes accepted to the program, you can access the Expedia custom booking system and dedicated call center, which will even help you with cancellations.
Should you join the Expedia Affiliate Program
Whether you want to join Expedia or any other similar booking affiliate programs, it’s essential to know that it is not easy to make a lot of cash through these programs. Although the travel affiliate program niche is very competitive, its commission rates are relatively low. To make the right amount of money, you will require to get massive traffic to your site, which is becoming more difficult in the travel niche with more and more people getting into travel blogging. We are not implying that you should not try the Expedia booking affiliate programs, but you should not solely stick on them. Take this affiliate program as a potential source of extra money but not one that will make you rich.
To be successful in earning from this affiliate program, do not write articles on competitive keywords if you cannot deliver high value to the site visitors. Instead, try and research the less competitive keywords and link them to relevant bookings when best appropriate. You will find it hard to succeed with booking affiliate programs if you cannot produce high-quality content. That is why it is not the best thing to create a travel site to make money via affiliate marketing. Although you will get low competition keywords and write articles around them, the articles will most likely be generic because you won’t write them based on your real experience.
Wrap Up
Expedia is not a scam, and you can earn money through its affiliate programs. However, it is a competitive niche, and hence you need to get a unique angle to be successful. Some people think that it only involves cloning a travel aggregator site, and potential clients will be flocking to use it. No! It doesn’t work like that. The best way to get you space in this competitive space is finding low competition keywords, produce quality and engaging content and post it in all the social media channels and wait. Once you start getting some on your site, you can start trying out different affiliate programs and see those that convert for you. Generally, this is an incredibly excellent niche, but you require to have an articulate traffic acquisition strategy if you are to make legitimate money in Expedia.