TravelPayouts.com Affiliate Program Reviewed – Read Before Joining

FTC Disclosure: This is a paid review for TravelPayouts.com. Everything in here is my own opinion, I have not deleted anything I felt was necessary to keep, but I did give the company a chance to read it over and make comments before I published my TravelPayouts.com AffiliateProgram Review. Below you will also find a custom offer if you join the TravelPayouts.com Affiliate Program.

Please note programs and platforms change and evolve over time, so please check the comments for updates directly from the network.  I have not verified the accuracy of their claims and it will be up to you to determine if this network is a fit for you.

What is the TravelPayouts.com Affiliate Program about?

The TravelPayouts.com Affiliate Program is a bit odd when you first look at it. TravelPayouts.com is actually a mini network of three travel engines that scan through popular sites and bring you back results on your query. It is kind of like Kayak.com or some of the other aggregators. The three sites you can promote within the  TravelPayouts.com Affiliate Program are JetRadar.com, HotelLook.com and AviaSales.ru.

• jetradar.com – searches for flights.
• hotellook.com – searches for hotel rooms
• aviasales.ru – searches through 728 airlines or flights across eastern Europe so it is super specific and something I always look for when finding travel affiliate programs to promote.

If you join the TravelPayouts.com Travel Affiliate Program through this review and use code “ADAMRIEMER” they will give you 90% commissions from what they earn for getting bookings for flights and hotels. That is actually a pretty good deal!  I haven’t ever found another Travel Affiliate Program that offers something like this.  If you have a site or traffic about Eastern Europe or Russia or sports sites with people going to the olympics, you should check out TravelPayouts.com Travel Affiliate Program asap.

Should you join the TravelPayouts.com Travel Affiliate Program

I started evaluating a lot of different things within their platform and I actually like the platform a lot. That doesn’t mean I would instantly join or promote this specific travel Affiliate Program. Let me walk you through what I looked at, show you a couple of things within it and then I will give you my recommendation on their travel Affiliate Program. Remember I am a non-trademark bidding content site so I look at this from a viewpoint of content sites that can have their sales poached or lose their sales to toolbars, trademark bidders, adware, leaks, etc…

Good things about joining the TravelPayouts.com Affiliate Program

1. The TravelPayouts.com Affiliate Program sends you two welcoming emails once you’d joined – However there is a bad thing with this too. See 2. in the next section.
2. The site was in English – but some of the other things are not.
3. The interface is very easy to use and you can easily find what you need.
4. They have a news section on their dashboard which has stories on it. The stores are actually their newsletters and they are done pretty well. They have what the top ten partners are making which is awesome for inspiration, new features and launches with the site as well as other things that could really help you to grow with them and have new things to talk about.
5. The reports are very easy to read, find and work with.
6. They have search forms for your site. You can actually create search forms to add the travel features onto your site or blog directly. This is awesome!
7. They have a map feature which lets you pick an airport or possibly a few airports and then it shows the price to fly into those airports. If you live in a city with multiple or other cities nearby, this is huge!
8. They also feature a wordpress plug in which will display a search widget as well.
9. Nikita who has been in contact with me is very friendly and responsive. If he is managing the program and provides Affiliates with the same response times and hints, then I would say they have an attentive manager.
10. They also offer you the ability to white label some of the tools and lists so you can have your own version of their search features, engines and other tools.
11. I checked a couple of random toolbars and did not see them firing over the site. However there are a ton of them out there so it does not mean they are clean or that they don’t have PPV, etc… It is a good sign that I ran a few and didn’t see anything.

Bad things about joining the TravelPayouts.com Affiliate Program

1. Anyone can register and have instant access. I signed up and had the ability to get links. This means that any bad player from adware to trademark bidders could go in and join and begin poaching sales.  (This is their response to this statement – Everyone can register in our Affiliate Program and start using it, but it doesn’t mean that we do not have post-moderation. We check incoming traffic from our affiliates manually and automatically. Pre-moderation is not working because if someone really wants to pass moderation process – he will find the way.)
2. The 2 welcome letters were in another language without an English version so I could not read them.  (They are fixing this now.)

3. The links are direct links with parameters. This could actually be counted as a backlink meaning you are boosting their SEO above your own. You will probably want to no follow them, unless that could cause the link to not track. I don’t think it could, so make a test purchase to double check if you join.  (Here is their response – Our links will work with nofollow. All that you need is to send us a GET-parameter with a link, like http://jetradar.com/?marker=123456)
4. Reporting is not in real time. I clicked two of my links and they did not show up under today’s report.  (This is their response to this – Our statistics are updated every 5 minutes and it does not show visitors, that just click on a banner, but don’t search anything. If you search something you’ll see it in your account. We need to add this information into the help section.)
5. They have trademark bidders and people bidding on trademark + coupons.  (They wrote and said this is not allowed and are now going to be removing them and enforcing their PPC policies more strictly.)

6. They have a program on a network as well making it dual programs which is a big no for me normally.

Should you join the TravelPayouts.com Affiliate Program?

Here’s the big question. Should you join the TravelPayouts.com Travel Affiliate Program or move on. They do allow anyone to sign up. They do have trademark bidders. They are on multiple networks and anyone can sign up and have instant access. These are all things that would normally cause me to move on. However, they do have a few other things for their partners.

Because they offer some really cool tools like the white labeling, the maps and the widgets, I would actually give this one a shot. If I had a destination site, a travel only site or a site based around a specific city, town or vacation type, this would be one I would try. If my site was more general, I probably would move on. Unfortunately I don’t have sites dedicated to a specific city or destination so for me I won’t be promoting the TravelPayouts.com Affiliate Program, but if you do have a fit or have a site that is about travel, I probably would recommend you give them a shot.

The TravelPayouts.com Affiliate Program offers a ton of awesome tools. Although there is not a ton of protection for content sites, they are far better off than other similar programs. I think this is one that if you have a fit for them, go for it. If you don’t then don’t worry about it. If you do work with them, I’d love to hear your experience if you wouldn’t mind leaving a comment below to let us know what your experience has been like. I do have a couple of travel urls that have sat there empty for a few years so I might launch one to test this program since the tools are really cool.