A Travel Affiliate Program That Works?

Ever wondered how travel affiliates make money? Take a look at Travelgrove's program and you will quickly see that some travel affiliate programs do work.

(PRWEB) August 4, 2005 -- Travelgrove, a newly created travel meta search engine, went through what most affiliates had to go through; disappointing affiliate revenue, lack of transparency, bad reporting, bad service and more bad experiences.

Travelgrove was looking for partners that could appreciate valuable clicks. Driving expensive traffic from Google, Overture and other PPC engines and seeing little returns was often frustrating.

What turns off most affiliates is the transparency issue. Even though it's clear that large merchants like Travelocity, Hotwire, Cheaptickets, and others pay a proper comission, the affiliate is always left with distrust, because he has no control over reporting.

The source of all evil is fraud. In the past, some of the affiliate programs offered PPC revenue, but quickly realized that many affiliate partners were abusing the system, sending invalid clicks. In turn all programs switched to pay per action (CPA) models.

SEO allows some travel affiliate partners to still generate valuable traffic at a low cost, but the market is packed with competition. If you search for "travel" on Google, you are looking at 422,000,000 search results.

The second issue is that as a travel affiliate you can only do so much with SEO. Somewhere it caps out and you won't be able to get more traffic, unless you have a huge professional content team and people constantly working on the SEO portion of the business.

The successful travel affiliate creates a site that attracts users. Typically, unique content, consumer interactivity, blogs, forums etc can bring that value. Most travel affiliate programs really do not offer any added value, besides the same old "Get 30% off your next trip" or a basic search feature. Bottom line is that users do not come back for these features that they can find everywhere else, especially at the site that offered the search box.

Travelgrove created a program that will allow for more customization, better monetization, increased transparency, and on top of all a feature that actually adds value and generates user loyalty.

Travelgrove's Meta Search builds on the success of the comparison shopping model, where different merchants display the same products side by side. Travelgrove's search engine compares travel sites by accessing many different merchants at once with every single search. The user can easily compare travel products without leaving the site. It's a cool feature to any travel affiliate site and certainly not available on any other affiliate network.

On top of that, Travelgrove can customize the search results and this way makes sure that your site's users come back to you again and again and won't go to Travelgrove.

How does this make sense? By building a large network of publisher sites, Travelgrove increases the search volume and in turn receives higher cost per click rates with the merchants that are included in the search feature. All revenue on the landing page is shared with the travel affiliates that are sending the traffic. The travel affiliate can log into the live stats and view the specific searches, clicks, and revenue generation. Because all clicks are tracked and reported live, the affiliate gets much more transparency than waiting 3 weeks for a booking to be reported.

Besides the currently available airfare and hotel search, Travelgrove also offers a travel deals feed and will soon be adding a deals directory, car, cruises, and vacation search features to offer the full range of products to travel affiliates and Travelgrove users.

Why is this possible now rather than in the past? Travelgrove tracks all IPs and all search details. The system recognizes any suspicious click patterns that are not in line with what others are showing and alerts the affiliate manager for a detailed check up. Furthermore, the search is fully IP targeted to protect the advertisers from International traffic that they do not want to receive.

Maybe it's time to think "affiliate" again?!

Travelgrove's Website can be found at www.travelgrove.com.

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