Travelocity Affiliate Program Review: Is It Worth It?

Once you’ve got your website off the ground, it’s time to seek the best way to monetize it, and affiliate marketing is an excellent way to go.

In the travel niche, the Travelocity affiliate program sits at the top of the list. But is this affiliate program worth joining in 2021 and beyond?

Travelocity affiliate program is worth it because of its diverse product range and commission rates that range from 2% to 6% per sale. Some products such as exotic holiday packages are worth thousands of dollars a pop, earning the affiliate marketer good money all year round.

The rest of the article will cover crucial information to help you make the best of the Travelocity affiliate program:

Pros and cons of signing up for the Travelocity affiliate program
Getting started and joining Travelocity
Tip to increase your conversion rates
Notable rules and regulations of Travelocity

Perks of the Travelocity Affiliate Program

Travelocity sells a diverse range of travel-related products, which lets you appeal to a broad target audience.

Here’s a quick run-through of Travelocity services:

Flight tickets
Car rentals
Hotel and accommodation
Vacation packages
Cruises
Holiday activities
Trip ideas
Vacation packages

Joining the Travelocity affiliate program provides you with endless content ideas for your travel blog.

At any given time, Travelocity has a myriad of vacation packages on offer to help people plan their holiday trips.

You will never lack content and can ply readers with excellent travel ideas, destinations, and fun activities all year round.

Travelocity is revered for its stellar customer service and catering to the needs of a budget-conscious traveler.

The online travel agency provides affordable vacation packages, the lowest fare on flights, and hotel rates and values customer satisfaction more than anything else.

Travelocity helps people plan both domestic and international holidays. Therefore, you have a limitless choice of travel destinations, cheapest flights, hotel choices, and discounted travel accommodation to pick and promote on your website.

Here are the perks of joining the Travelocity affiliate program:

Diverse Commission Structure

Travelocity boasts a dynamic affiliate commission rates that are spread between fixed sums and percentages of the service being sold:

Airline ticket – $2
Prepaid hotels – 6%
Pay at a hotel – 3%
Cruises – $30
Car rentals – 2%
Vacation package – 3%

A 45-Day Tracking Cookie

Planning a vacation is a delicate process that requires careful planning. A lengthy tracking cookie allows anyone who clicks your affiliate link ample time to plan and pay for a trip or vacation.

Travelocity keeps your tracking ID for 45 days and will pay the preset commission once the sale goes through.

It ensures that you get paid even when customers book a hotel through your link but opt to pay for it when signing in.

Custom Promotional Material

Travelocity supplies its affiliates with a host of promotional materials to help them with their marketing efforts.

You can pepper your website with banners advertising car rentals, limited-time sales, travel packages, and best price guarantee.

The banners are fun, catchy, and attention-grabbing, which is great for your clickthrough rates and conversion rates.

Travelocity offers a host of text links to hot weekly and monthly deals to help you run more exciting promotions on your website. That serves to incentivize readers to check your website to snag the discounts and offers.

You also have access to a multitude of custom Flight, Hotel, and Rental Car search boxes that enable customers to search by dates and destination.

Travelocity Is Free to Join

You only need to pass the initial assessment to start earning affiliate commission through your website.

As with most online affiliate programs, it’s helpful to build an audience before applying to join the program.

Travelocity manually vets each applicant to ensure that only credible webmasters join the program.

Lax Terms of Engagement

Travelocity doesn’t impose draconian conditions on its affiliates.

Instead, the online travel agency gives you a freehand at running your website. The agency issues a few guidelines to eliminate conflict of interest and direct competition.

Otherwise, you’re free to run your website as you please. You’re free to use free and paid online marketing strategies to grow your site’s readership.

You Can Join Other Affiliate Programs

Being a Travelocity affiliate doesn’t preclude you from entering other affiliate programs and growing your income.

You can even join other affiliate programs in the travel sector without running into trouble with the online travel agency.

However, you need to be smart with your product placement to avoid promoting direct competition.

As you can see, Travelocity has a lot to offer anyone looking to monetize a website in the travel or related niche.

You retain total control of your website, join as many affiliate programs, and increase your site’s earning potential.

Check Out A Completely Free Affiliate Marketing Training

Potential Deal Breakers in the Travelocity Affiliate Program

Now that we’ve looked at this affiliate program’s highpoints, it’s only fair that we look at the potential downsides.

While the program has lots of high points, you should be aware of some minor wrinkles before immersing yourself in it.

Here are some of the issues associated with Travelocity:

It’s only available through Click Junction Affiliate Portal. You must sign up to Click Junction to access this affiliate offer. While CJ is free to sign up, the site has a slight learning curve and can be a tad confusing to beginners.

Travelocity uses a manual vetting process. A human appraiser will assess your suitability for the program based on your profile’s strength on the CJ affiliate portal. That makes for a slow approval process and increases the chances of rejection because of a weak profile.

You can’t customize the banners and text links. The affiliate program doesn’t allow you to alter the marketing products to match your website’s theme and brand colors.
Some of the offers have short expiry. Such offers require you to update your website regularly to improve user experience and build credibility.

The issues mentioned here are more of an annoyance than a hurdle in your journey to grow your affiliate income.

The program offers seasoned and upcoming bloggers in the travel-related space to increase their income without incurring high upfront costs.

You only need to live up to Travelocity’s professional standards to reap huge rewards from its affiliate program.

Should You Become a Travelocity Affiliate?

Becoming a successful Travelocity affiliate takes dedication and commitment but can be highly rewarding. Luckily, it doesn’t call for a change in business strategy if you’re in a travel-related sector.

However, if you’re on the fence about signing up, this guide can help you make an informed decision.

To decide if the affiliate program is for you, answer the following questions:

Can You Help Travelocity Grow Sales?

Companies launch affiliate programs to invite independent contractors to help market their products and services.

For their troubles, the contractors earn a commission for any sales they generate through their websites. As such, affiliate marketing is a business relationship that hinges on your ability to create sales.

Travelocity uses Click Junction Affiliate Portal to run and manage its affiliate program.

The portal requires every affiliate in its database to generate sales and earn commission promoting products and services for their advertisers.

If you don’t earn a commission in 30 days, the portal will terminate your membership, effectively ending your Travelocity membership as well.

Are You in a Travel-Related Niche?

If you run a tour agency, travel blog, or a site that reviews hotels, you’re a ripe candidate for this affiliate program. A small tweak to your web content might be all you need to start promoting the offers on Travelocity.

The colorful, professionally designed banners the agency supplies to affiliates can help with the conversion rates.

The programs help you expand the scope of your website to cover all aspects of travel. You can now include car hire, hotels and accommodation, vacation packages, holiday destinations, air tickets, and more.

Are You Targeting the Right Audience?

To succeed in affiliate marketing, you must put the item and services on offer before the right audience.

Insights into your target audience will help you pick the right offers, destinations, and holiday packages to promote.

Knowing your web visitors’ demographics offers insights into their interests, preferences, and, most importantly, financial capabilities.

You won’t have much success if you present your audience with holidays that are beyond their means.

Can You Provide Value to Your Readers?

Most people turn to the internet for helpful information, insights, advice, and solutions. Therefore, you need to go beyond providing them with listicles to convert readers into prospects.

Successful affiliate marketers seek to understand their audience’s needs and then find creative ways to fill those needs.

It would be best to offer your readers unique value to gain their trust and loyalty, two crucial ingredients in online marketing.

If your readers trust your advice and view you as a subject matter expert, they will gladly purchase any service and products you recommend.

Are You Willing to Generate Loads of Content?

As mentioned earlier, Travelocity program affiliate rates range between 2% to 6%. At first glance, the rates might seem discouraging, but Travelocity’s reputation as a budget-traveler platform more than makes up for it.

Due to its stellar reputation, budget-friendly offers, and diverse range of services, Travelocity receives well over 3 million visitors monthly.

Getting a sliver of these visitors to purchase through your affiliate links can translate into a considerable income.

To tap into the vast web traffic, you need to pepper your web pages with superior travel-related content and offers regularly.

Fresh content keeps your readers engaged and goes a long way in building readership, which is crucial to your lead generation efforts.

Are You Willing to Actively Manage Your Website?

While most affiliate sites follow a ‘set it and forget it’ model, this might be hard to achieve when looking to monetize with Travelocity. The travel sector is subject to seasonality due to changing weather conditions.

Seasonality has a cyclic effect on holiday destinations, airfares, hotel bookings, and more. That affects the kind and type of offers you’ll be promoting to your audience. Again, Travelocity routinely changes the banners and text links to reflect the current hot offers.

To cash in on these offers and opportunities, you need to keep a finger on the pulse. Otherwise, you’d be left promoting expired offers, which can ding your credibility with readers and hurt your conversion rates.

Related Post: TripAdvisor Affiliate Program Review

How to Sign Up for Travelocity Affiliate Program

Travelocity uses Click Junction Affiliate Portal to manage its affiliate marketing program. Therefore, you need to sign up with Click Junction to access Travelocity’s affiliate offers.

Luckily, Click Junction is free to join, and the process is relatively painless.

Fill in your email address and password to sign up as a publisher. The site will prompt you to confirm your email address to create an account.

Log in to your email account, open the mail from CJ Affiliate and click ‘Create My CJ Publisher Account.’ That will direct you to the Publisher Sign Up Form. Enter all the required information and click ‘Accept Terms‘ to complete registration.

The site logs you into your account and directs you to the CJ Account Manager. This dashboard displays crucial details, such as network statistics, messages, and performance summary.

CJ Affiliate then prompts you to follow an 8-step process to activate your account.

Click Administrative Setting. You need to fill in your name, home address, phone number, banking details, and tax information to activate your CJ account.

Open Network Profile and fill in the necessary information. The information you put in its three sections determines your success in joining Travelocity’s affiliate program.

Think of it as a cover letter and use it to demonstrate the value you bring to the table and how you will help them reach more people through your website.
1. Website description. Enter your site’s URL and all the relevant statistics such as monthly visitors, traffic sources, and visitors’ demographics.
2. Promotion methods. Explain the channels you use to drive traffic to your website and promote offers. Popular methods include SEO, social media, email marketing, PPC, etc.
3. Documents. Explain if you use a media kit and elaborate on your rates.

Once you’re done with the 8-step account activation process, you’re ready to begin.

Search for the Travelocity affiliate program using CJ’s search bar. The advertisement will show up in the results window.

Click the Join Program. A popup window will open, informing you that the advertiser approves publishers manually. Your application is now complete. Travelocity will get back to you after reviewing your application. Be patient and resist the temptation to apply multiple times. You don’t want to come off as a bot, which could result in instant rejection.

Click Junction is a reputable site in the affiliate marketing sector, so don’t be alarmed by the amount of personal information they require.

The site needs your banking and tax information because it processes your affiliate income from Travelocity.

Free High Ticket Affiliate Marketing Training

Tips to Increase Your Conversion Rates

Once you’ve been approved for the Travelocity affiliate program, it’s time to hit the ground running and promote the best offers.

However, you need tact and strategy when presenting these offers to your audience, especially since you’ll have to change your site to include banner advertisements.

Stuffing your pages full of banners and advertisements can ruin your credibility and user experience.

With proper execution, you can alter your website to accommodate the affiliate offers without antagonizing your readers.

Here are some proven tips to help you grow your site’s traffic while optimizing your conversion rates:

Improve Your Site’s Online Visibility

Increasing your site’s online visibility lets you tap into lucrative organic search traffic. First, you need to understand the needs of your audience and target the right keywords.

If you do a thorough job, search engines will send qualified traffic to your website. Research shows the website at the top of search results pages has a 36% clickthrough rate.

Snagging a top position on Google not only grows your sites but your conversion rates as well. Proper keyword research, understanding search intent, and providing valuable content to your readers can earn you the coveted first-page spot on Google.

Understand Your Audience

A deep understanding of your target audience is key to attracting high-value visitors to your website. You can achieve this feat by creating a buyer persona—a fictional representation of your ideal customer.

A detailed buyer persona lets you drill down into their specific interests, needs, background, financial status, and more.

With this information, you can create web content that resonates with the target audience, which is a proven way to grow readership. For instance, if your site targets parents with younger kids, you can create a post that addresses vacationing challenges with children.

Insights into their financial status let you pick products and services that are likely to grab their attention. Matching the right audience with the correct offers is an excellent way to increase your conversion rates.

Segment Your Audience

Successful affiliate marketers find ways to separate casual web browsers from potential customers. Potential customers have more than a passing interest in the offers on your website. In most cases, they’re ready to buy but need a little more convincing or information before committing to the deal.

To target and close such people, you need to launch a targeted marketing campaign. That entails having them jump on your email list and sending them offers that pique their interest and preferences. With an email list, you can use clickthrough rates to gauge a prospect’s stage in the buyer’s journey.

You can then create a sales funnel that addresses each stage of the buyer’s decision and help them make an informed choice.

Segmenting your audience increases your conversion rates. It allows you to manage most of the concerns people have when planning a vacation or making online payments.

Ply Your Audience With Promotions and Offers

Peppering your site with new and exciting offers all-year-round will grow its popularity. Alongside these offers, shower them with useful tips, insights, and advice to make the best decisions.

That’ll grow your brand authority, making it a one-stop-shop for people looking to plan a vacation or take a trip.

Making your site into a valuable resource for this target audience builds your brand image and credibility in addition to earning your site a cult-like following.

Since Travelocity has a global outlook, you’ll never run out of hot products to promote all-year-round.

Great insights into your target audience will help you pick the most appealing offers all-year. Such an approach helps to build your brand reputation and have people joining your email list.

Promote Your Website

To stand out in the highly competitive sector, you should employ a slew of online marketing techniques and strategies.

In addition to SEO and email marketing, consider social media marketing, guest posting, and paid advertising.

Besides Facebook and Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest are excellent ways to promote exotic holiday destinations and vacation packages. With proper research and execution, Facebook and Google ads can pay off in droves.

Most importantly, make every effort to own your web audience. Over-reliance on SEO can pose a significant challenge to your website.

If a search engine update knocks you off the top search results, your web traffic might decline to a trickle alongside your affiliate income.

Building an email list is the best way to own your audience as your ability to reach them isn’t dependent on a third-party organization’s policies. It also adds a personal touch to your marketing efforts, which can increase the conversion rates.

Related Post: Super Affiliate Network Review – Is It Worth Signing Up?

What Are the Rules of Travelocity Affiliate Program?

While Travelocity leaves you to your devices when it comes to running your website, it does have a few rules that affiliates must observe. Luckily, most of them revolve around protecting its brand image and don’t interfere in your ability to promote and grow your affiliate website.

Here’s everything you need to know about Travelocity’s rules and regulations:

Don’t Use Protected Search Terms

To prevent affiliates from competing with and outranking their clients in online search campaigns, Travelocity issues a list of protected keywords. Mostly these are trademark names of airlines, hotels, and resorts. Using these terms in your online campaign would make you a direct competitor to these businesses.

Some of the prohibited search terms on Travelocity include:

Travelocity
Travelocity.com
Atlantis Casino Resort
Chamberlain
Fairmont
Maison 140 Beverly Hills
CheapTickets

Using any of the protected search terms on your site can lead to your affiliate membership cancellation.

You Can’t Use “Travelocity” in Your Domain Name

The agency prohibits affiliates from using a domain name that puts your site in direct competition with its website.

You can’t join the affiliate program if your website contains the word Travelocity or any of its variants.

For instance, you can’t use domain names such as travelocitydeals.com, bestofTravelocity.com, and mytravelocity.com.

Since Travelocity is a trademarked name, attempting to register such a domain can have serious legal ramifications. It also guarantees that you can’t join the affiliate program.

You Should Use Bid on General Search Terms

The online agency recommends affiliates to use travel-related search terms in their online marketing campaigns.

These terms will garner page views without putting you in direct competition with the service providers whose services you’re marketing.

Recommended search terms include:

Airfares
Airline tickets
Cruises
Car rental
Vacation
Travel agency

You Cannot Bid on Travelocity or Its Variants

For webmasters using PPC campaigns such as Google ads to drive traffic to their websites, you cannot bid on keywords with the name Travelocity.

The cost of Google ads keywords hinges on demand. Bidding on these keywords would raise its price, forcing the agency to incur high marketing costs.

It would also trigger a bidding war that would put you in direct competition with Travelocity.

You Can’t Use ‘Travelocity’ in Your Social Media Handle

Travelocity is a trademarked name; therefore, you can’t use it or any of its variants as your name or business page name on any social networking site.

Additionally, you may not use any of Travelocity’s copyrighted materials, including images and logo as your profile image.

You may not use the trademark ‘Travelocity’ in your paid search marketing campaign.

For instance, you shouldn’t run an ad that reads—Save $50 on Travelocity Luxor Hotel and Casino Stays: (Link to your website).

Instead, the ad should read—Save $50 on Luxor Hotel, and Casino Stays: (Link to your website).

Some Items Aren’t Commissionable

You will not earn any commission if a customer books and pays for their travel package through a third party who advertises on Travelocity.com.

In essence, Travelocity imposes restrictions on activities that can harm its band name or cause the agency or its advertisers to incur unnecessary costs.

If you observe these guidelines, the chances of being kicked out of this lucrative and rewarding affiliate program are slim.

Conclusion

Travelocity remains one of the best travel-related affiliate programs in 2020. The program offers a broad range of products that range from car rentals, hotel stays, holiday destinations, vacation packages, and more.

While the commissions are a tad low, the diverse products and services spread worldwide make it worthwhile. The online agency offers some of the lowest travel and holiday packages on the internet, increasing your chances of making repeat sales.

With its global coverage, the Travelocity affiliate program has enough products to help affiliate markets earn commissions all-year-round.