Lately I have been starting to evaluate the power of affiliate marketing. So far I have been playing around with two affiliate marketing programs - Booking.com and Amazon Associates.
Speaking of first (Booking) - the results kinda suck, while second (Amazon) seems like a brilliant finding.
Since I'm not seeing any return of using Booking I started to look to another hotel affiliate programs, after a few days guessing what could be a very good alternative for Booking - I decided to opt in for Hotels.com
About Hotels.com
Hotels.com has over 290,000 cheap hotels in more than 60 countries. Our 11 million genuine guest reviews will help you find a cheap motel, extended stay or hotel accommodation. Simply check our best deals, discounts and offers and find a hotel near me or the location you are searching for. Whether you are travelling last minute as a family or need a hotel for business, we have the right hotel at the lowest rates for you. We also have a 24-hour call centre, if you would prefer booking with a real person. Don't forget about our Best Price Guarantee and Last Minute Deals. Plus, no change or cancel fee from Hotels.com to ease your mind with your next hotel booking. The best prices for the accommodation of your choice are here. Guaranteed.® Enjoy your stay with Hotels.com – An Expedia Inc. Company.
About Hotels.com Affiliates program
You will earn 5.5% commission on each booking that becomes a completed hotel stay. Bookings are posted to your account in near real time, but no commission is attributed to the booking until it becomes a completed stay.
Bookings are tracked by pixel and reported once the reservation is made; completed stays are batched once per day for the previous day's completed stays. Plus, we have a 7-day action referral period.
Earn more with Hotels.com! Earn up to 6% commission with the following performance tiers:
- For monthly Sales equal to or greater than $8,000.00 increase commission to 5.75%
- For monthly Sales equal to or greater than $12,000.00 increase commission to 6.00%
One of the things I found most attractive - hotels.com offers xml data feeds and I already started to figure out what kind of XML import functions I could build using power of Drupal.
How to apply for Hotels.com affiliate program
Hotels.com handles their affiliates via third party services, like - Commission Junction, TradeDoubler, Affiliate Window, Zanox, Offer Forge and others.
I opted in by using CJ (Commission Junction). If honest I'm complete newbie both to Hotels.com and CJ as well, not to speak of Affiliate Marketing as whole.
I haven't yet started to promote any of Hotels.com products (hotel rooms, obviously) - I'm just at the stage of exploration of integration options.
My plan is simple - while it sounds tempting to build some XML feed parser, I doubt I will go this way completely - I might to build some XML feeds for Travel Deals and create some mashup review articles, but for a start I'm looking for deep link integration.
Strategy of my affiliate promotion for a start as usual will be simple - rather for chasing for commission's I will test how many users on monthly base I can send to their booking site. You might find useful my thoughts of setting first Booking.com affiliate marketing goal.
What are your thoughts about Hotels.com Partner Program? Drop a comment!