Ultimately, the ethos of any travel business is adventure. You started this project to share your love of exploration with the world. But as we all know, a business can’t run on passion alone. It has to run a profit. Affiliate links bridge the gap between creative content and revenue, connecting your ideas and advice to actual sales. 

Your readers tune into the content you offer because they want trustworthy information and inspired recommendations. Affiliate links turn your recommendations directly into their experiences. And in return, they help you make money doing what you love.

Affiliate link programs with Online Travel Agencies (OTAs), like Tiqets, help small travel businesses, bloggers, influencers, and solo entrepreneurs align with bigger travel partners such as OTAs to promote products and services related to their subject matter.  

How affiliate links work

Consider an art museum blogger reviewing the iconic Paris Musée National d’Art Moderne in the Centre Pompidou, known as the Beaubourg to locals (just the kind of insider tip readers love). The blogger mentions the works of Frida Kahlo, Matisse, Metzinger, and Kandinsky, then touches on the enormous public library and center for music research on the campus. The reader, enticed, is keen to buy tickets to the museum. An inline affiliate link makes that journey easy and seamless. 

The affiliate link contains a code that sends the reader to a special URL – invisible to the reader but essential to your business – in order to track the sale and allocate the commission to you. The reader stays within the “brand experience” of your business, seeing your logo at the top of the Tiqets ticket-purchase page. 

It’s a fairly simple model that benefits everyone in the equation:

1. The reader has an easy way to purchase museum tickets through the affiliate link

2. The affiliate receives a commission on each sale. 

3. The OTA benefits from exposure to a new audience with deep trust in the recommender.

But let’s dig a little deeper into the dynamics of the OTA/affiliate relationship.

3 reasons to use affiliate links in your content

People are eager to get back to traveling right now, and they’re hopping on the web to research ideas. You may have noticed a spike in your website traffic lately, as air travel and vacation rentals begin to pick back up in the wake of a pandemic. While a lot of people are “just browsing,” people are also starting to make concrete travel plans, and they turn to content like yours to help them with those plans. The synthesis created when you align with an OTA for affiliate links adds value for your readers and helps build loyalty for your brand. 

You’re already giving them the ideas. Now, you can give them a way to act on those ideas by embedding affiliate links into your content. For the reader, the benefits are obvious. For you, there are a few specific advantages to using affiliate links:

1. Low barrier to implementation: Affiliate links are extremely easy to generate and implement, and you don’t need any special technology skills or an expert on your team to use them

2. High conversion: Affiliate links generate high conversion rates, so they bring higher commission returns than some advertising techniques

3. Flexibility: They’re very easy to adapt into content

To that last point, affiliate links work best when they’re integrated into your content in a natural way. If you’re a museum reviewer, an OTA that specializes in cruises may not be particularly helpful to your readers — nor lucrative for you. On the other hand, if you’re a museum reviewer with an audience that often disembarks from cruise ships in particular cities in order to check out local attractions, it very well might!

Your primary incentive for using affiliate links is to generate an extra revenue stream. The easier they are to implement, the better return you get on your relationship. Presumably you’re not signing up to be an affiliate because you love to tinker with technology, so for the effort to pay worthwhile dividends, it has to be incredibly easy to get up and running.

How to implement affiliate links with Tiqets

Tiqets, with its extensive inventory of global cultural attractions and its easy-to-implement affiliate program, can help your travel business find the right angle on affiliate links. The TIqets Affiliate Program is for travel bloggers, travel site owners, and culture and leisure promoters who want to add customer value to their content while simultaneously creating a passive revenue stream. The program provides easy affiliate links, widgets, banners, and pages to customize your content and send your readers to venues and activities in over 250 cities and 50 countries around the world. 

Within the Tiqets Affiliate Portal, creating a link is simple once you’ve signed up for the Tiqets Affiliate Program: 

1. Use the “Link Generator” to create an affiliate link that automatically contains the right code for your account.

2. Embed that affiliate link within your content.

3. Sit back and enjoy the credit – whenever your reader clicks on it to buy tickets through Tiqets, you’ll receive credit for the sale!

To the reader, the information is presented in a simple, straightforward, visually appealing way. To you, the affiliate, it’s equally simple. All the fancy footwork takes place behind the scenes in code supplied automatically by Tiqets.

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Driving sales as a Tiqets affiliate partner

One of the ways Tiqets makes our affiliate program more flexible and usable for partners is by offering myriad ways to connect your content to revenue options. With the Tiqets link generator tool, you can create coded affiliate links to a venue, city, country, or category. Leaning into the museum blogger analogy, one might write about:

- The hidden charm of the Fundació Joan Miró, to which readers can buy tickets on this venue page

- All the other incredible things to do in Spain while you’re visiting the Fundació Joan Miró, on this country page

- A breakdown of museum and galleries in Madrid; readers can buy tickets on this category page

- Your 6 favorite museums in Barcelona, which can be booked with a link to the Tiqets Barcelona Museum Pass page

Tiqets grants the flexibility for affiliates to create various types of links so that they can be used organically within your content, and links never feel forced or “salesy.” You can promote what’s relevant to your content and readers and be intentional about how you implement your affiliate links and widgets. 

You can also tune in to your affiliate account dashboard at any time to see what’s working and what’s not, in order to recalibrate the way you’re using your affiliate link options and optimize the experience for your fans and readers.

While a love of adventure and a yen to experience new things lies behind every travel blogger’s mission and every blog reader’s motivation, without a practical way to act on the advice you give, it’s all just a whimsical read. With an affiliate program in place, whimsical transforms into winning revenue.

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