If you’ve landed on this post, I’m going to guess that you fall into one of three schools:

1. You’re considering applying to the booking.com affiliate program
2.  You’ve recently been accepted into the program but aren’t quite sure what to do next
3. You’ve been in it for some time but are unsatisfied with your lackluster booking.com affiliate commission rates.

In any case, welcome! I’m a travel blogger who was in your shoes once. Basically, I got accepted into the affiliate program…and was then sort of thrown to the wolves to figure out what the heck to do on my own.

While getting accepted as a booking.com affiliate in and of itself is pretty simple, after that, not so much. Let’s just say there’s a bit of a (massive) learning curve.

Luckily, that’s where this handy (not-so-little) guide comes into play.

Fortunately, you won’t need to reckon with any metaphorical wolves after consuming this article. I’m going to break down everything you need to know about raking in those sweet, sweet booking.com affiliate commission rates you’ve been dreaming of.

(And if you do find yourself wrestling with fictitious wolves by the end, please tell me so in the comments so that I can make this post an even more valuable resource for the future.)

Let’s start with a brief overview of what got me here…

About two months or so after getting accepted, I made my first affiliate sale – which was more than a month’s worth of my ad income – and it was basically the best day ever.

But, as someone who also suffers from imposter syndrome, I convinced myself that my good fortune must be a passing stroke of “beginner’s luck.”

…And then the commissions kept rolling in. And they haven’t stopped.

So I’ve decided to tell my imposter syndrome to go take a hike and accept the reality that I do, in fact, actually know what I’m doing. (And my marketing background certainly doesn’t hurt, either. More on that later.)

But even more importantly, I’ve realized that I can help you achieve success as a booking.com affiliate, too. And that gets me really jazzed.

So with all of that said, let’s dive into the reason you’re here – to uncover how to take your booking.com affiliate commission rates to the next level!

This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase through these links, I will earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. Read the full disclosure here.

In simple terms, the booking.com affiliate program enables bloggers to earn commissions on property bookings made through their websites. Ultimately, the more properties booked through your website, the more you’ll earn.

And with the largest selection of online accommodations available, it’s no wonder there are over 12,500 affiliates in the booking.com affiliate network!

Booking.com uses session tracking to determine whether or not you’ll receive a commission on the sales you generate. Since the cookie lifetime is only a single session, that means a website visitor will need to click on your affiliate link upon their first visit and officially book a stay before exiting out of the browser window.

Given this incredibly short window of time to make a sale, it’s critical that your content meets searcher intent, which we’ll delve into later.

Applying to the affiliate program is super simple and you’ll find out on the spot if you’re accepted or not. Unlike many other affiliate programs, you won’t need to wait days/weeks/months for an acceptance email and there are zero confusing hoops to jump through to apply.

Simply go to the booking.com affiliate login page, fill in the required fields, and submit! It’s really that easy.

As long as you have relevant, travel-related content on a secure website, you should have no issue getting in. (Also, you don’t actually have to have a full-on travel blog; you just need to have some content related to travel on your site.)

Once you’re (hopefully) accepted, you can begin promoting properties and working toward those booking.com affiliate commission rates right away!

So, what can you expect to make as an affiliate of booking.com?

You can earn anywhere from 25% to 40% of booking.com’s commission cut. Keep in mind that your commission percentage is not based off of the total property cost, but off of the commission that booking.com receives first (which can range from 10% – 20%).

Unfortunately, booking.com does not openly disclose exactly how much they receive, as it can vary based on several factors, including where the property is located, for example.

So…how do you know whether you can expect booking.com affiliate commission rates of 25%, 30%, 35%, or 40% ?

That all depends on how many bookings you make over the course of a month!

Here’s a handy chart to help you visualize what your potential earnings could be:

So here’s where things get a bit sticky – and why many bloggers aren’t the biggest fans of booking.com. Compared to other affiliate programs, booking.com takes a really, really long time to pay you because they have an obnoxiously long payout cycle.

Basically, you don’t get paid until your bookers officially check out of their stays – and booking.com has had enough time to do their standard verification checks and process the payments. This process can usually take about two months post-stay.

So let’s say it’s now May and someone just booked a hotel stay via one of your links for October. You won’t see a dime of those earnings until after the guest checks out in October (and until after booking.com has completed all their verification checks and processed the payment).

Unfortunately, unless you’re making incredibly frequent sales with high commission rates, you’re not going to reap the fruits of your labor from booking.com for some time. This is definitely not the program to join if you’re looking for a weekly (or even bi-weekly) paycheck.

Also, keep in mind that you will not receive any commission for any cancelled stays.

Since it can be a bit confusing (and maddening) to try and understand the payout cycle at first, I suggest watching this YouTube video that helps break it down.

Full Transparency: I’ve decided to write this blog post since I’ve had a lot of success racking up hotel commissions – and a lot of interested Instagram followers who wanted me to write it. However, since I’ve only been in the program for a few months, I still have yet to get an official check!

In the meantime, I celebrate each booking that comes in, keep track of my potential earnings, and eagerly await the day when that big, fat check finally hits my bank account.

That said, on the positive side, a longer payout cycle means that you can expect bigger checks when they finally do go through!

So now that I’ve (hopefully not) scared you from joining the program in the first place, let me cover why being a booking.com affiliate can actually be quite lucrative. 

First off, booking.com is a known and trusted name in the hospitality space. Trust me when I say, it’s much easier to sell your visitors on a brand that’s already established than on a start-up company that no one has ever heard of.

With over 28 million reported property listings and content available in 43 languages across the globe, booking.com is a household name. This makes your website visitors much more likely to recognize and trust it.

And as with any form of marketing, it’s essential to build trust with your audience before you can even hope to make a sale. Fortunately, by partnering with booking.com, the element of trust-building is already taken care of for you (which is half the work right there).

In addition, if you devise a solid content strategy – which I’m going to guide you through in the points below – you can actually see a great deal of success as a booking.com affiliate over time. You just need to be willing to put in the work upfront to reap the rewards later.

Quite frankly, as a travel blogger who is constantly discussing properties and my experience with hotel collaborations, one of the biggest regrets of my blogging career is not joining the booking.com affiliate program sooner.

Well, I was waiting for the day when I could let my former-copywriter-at-a-marketing-agency roots show, and it’s finally that time!

Before you attempt to sell anything online – whether it be No. 2 pencils or a penthouse suite in Vegas – you’ll need to have at least a basic understanding of the buyer’s journey.

So…what is the buyer’s journey, exactly?

In essence, it’s the research process a user undergoes from the initial awareness of a need to the final purchase.

There are 3 main stages to the buyer’s journey:

1. Awareness Stage – A prospect becomes aware of a potential problem they need to solve or a possible opportunity they want to pursue.
2. Consideration Stage – The prospect has now precisely defined their problem/opportunity and is researching different methods to either resolve the issue or take advantage of the opportunity.
3. Decision Stage – The prospect has made a decision on the solution strategy or approach they wish to pursue to reach their ultimate goal. They are now researching vendors that align with their wishes with the goal of making a final decision and a purchase.

In the context of hotel bookings, here’s a quick example to illustrate how this might play out:

1. (Awareness Stage) Jane Doe discovers the beautiful town of Positano for the first time via a Reel she sees on her Instagram Explore page. She’s inspired by the gorgeous scenery and starts fantasizing about visiting, but knows nothing about the destination. She begins doing some research on Google to learn more about it.
2. (Consideration Stage) Jane learns that Positano is situated along Italy’s Amalfi Coast. She reads a number of blog posts about it to find out what there is to do in Positano as well as how to get there. She’s excited by what she sees and realizes that Positano will be the perfect anniversary destination for her and her husband. She then starts looking into different neighborhoods and considers whether she’d like to stay along the beach for convenience or atop the hill for the best view.
3. (Decision Stage) Jane has decided that a beach hotel is the best fit because she wants to cut back on the number of stairs she and her husband will need to climb each day. She’s willing to pay a bit more for this convenience and establishes her budget. Now armed with the knowledge to select an appropriate hotel, she begins looking at available properties near the beaches of Positano that are in her price range.

Ultimately, for the best chance of increasing your booking.com affiliate commission rates, you want to meet website visitors where they are – in the decision stage of the buyer’s journey.

Why?

Well, if your prospect is already in the decision stage, that means they’re at the final stage of research. At this last stage, they are now actively seeking out available options with the intention of making a purchase.

Since the booking.com session duration is incredibly short (as I mentioned above), it’s critical that your content is aligned with searcher intent and primed for the decision stage.

Let me give you a little example of what I mean.

Let’s say you’ve written an article titled: “Is Palermo, Sicily Worth Visiting?” You’ve included your booking.com affiliate links within the post. In a few months, your article is ranking on the first page of Google. While you’re hyped that people are finally reading it, you’ve noticed that no one has booked a hotel stay via your affiliate links. What gives?

Unfortunately, a “reasons to visit” style post isn’t going to garner much (or any) booking action because it isn’t reaching people at the decision stage of their journey. Instead, this is very much so an example of awareness-stage content.

Think about it.

Imagine you’ve just discovered an interesting new destination and you’ve started digging around on Pinterest and Google to learn more about it. You first want to know what it’s all about, why it’s worth the trip, and what there even is to do there. You’re just starting to dip your toes into the metaphorical pool and getting acclimated to the water temperature. This is the awareness stage because you’re just becoming aware of what’s out there for the first time.

Shoehorning decision-focused booking.com affiliate links into an awareness-stage article is a bit nonsensical (and off-putting) at this early stage of the buyer’s journey. Keep in mind that your readers aren’t even sure yet that they actually want to visit the destination you’re discussing, so why would they book a hotel?

Instead, for the best chance of driving up those booking.com affiliate commission rates, you need to strategically place your links in the right place at the right time. It’s all about considering the needs of your audience at each stage of their journey and then meeting them where they are with helpful content that addresses their questions.

Some great decision-based content posts that have worked wonders for me (and garnered affiliate commissions) are hotel-focused round-up posts and travel itineraries.

Accommodation-focused round-up posts are exactly what they sound like; you round up a list of properties in a destination that have a specific feature that a traveler may be looking for. (I’ve included several examples of this in the next section on mastering long-tail keywords.)

Travel itineraries are also a great place for you to house your affiliate links because travelers tend to look at itineraries once they’ve already decided that they’re going somewhere. They’ll typically be in the consideration or decision stage at this point.

At this time, it’s fitting to include hotel options for your readers, since booking a hotel stay is probably the next thing on their agenda anyway (if they haven’t done so already).

If you want to achieve success with your booking.com affiliate commission rates, you’ll first need to get your head around some basic SEO. (You’ll also find that it’s challenging to “make it” as a blogger without a good working knowledge of SEO in general, even if your Pinterest game is on point.)

So if you’re new to the world of blogging and/or you’re not super familiar with the concept of long-tail keywords, I’ll give you a very basic introduction. A long-tail keyword is a longer, more specific phrase/grouping of words that users type into a search engine when they’re looking to take a particular action (such as purchase a product or book a hotel stay).

So what does this look like in practice? Well, it’s the difference between typing “Italy hotels” and “boutique hotels on the Amalfi Coast” into Google, for example. The first search phrase is quite broad, whereas the second is much more targeted (a long-tail keyword).

When you’re doing initial keyword research, you want to seek out long-tail keywords with a sizable search volume and relatively low competition so that it will be easier to rank.

To see this in practice, here are some of my accommodation-focused blog posts targeting long-tail keywords that are ranking on page one of Google:

• 25 Most Romantic Wine Hotels in Tuscany
• 20 Fantastic Florence Hotels Near the Duomo (with Killer Views)
• 12 Awesome Curacao Diving Resorts for an Epic Caribbean Escape

If you’re not already using a keyword research tool for your blog or website, it’s definitely time to start! I highly recommend Keysearch, which is the platform I use to research keywords for all of my articles. This is an invaluable tool to have in your toolbox as a blogger, as it makes the process of conducting keyword research super simple.

Keysearch provides a ton of useful resources to help you create the best possible content and outrank your competition on Google.

With Keysearch, you’ll be able to:

• Search for relevant keywords, determine their level of competition, and receive search volume estimates
• Access alternative keyword suggestions for the best chance of ranking
• Determine the top competitors for your desired keywords with essential information, including domain authority, page authority, and backlinks
• Conduct a detailed, competitive analysis on your competitors and uncover content gaps that you can fill

I honestly can’t recommend this research tool enough, particularly considering it costs less than $200 for an entire year. It’s really a great value, especially considering that I log into mine almost daily!

There are a number of factors that will determine your booking.com affiliate income, and one of the most foundational ones is the quality of hotels you share about.

That said, I do not think you should share about expensive hotels you don’t like just to make a quick buck. In fact, I highly advise against doing that! At the end of the day, your reputation is worth way more than a commission, so you should always make sure that the properties you’re promoting are aligned with your brand, values, personal preferences, existing content on your website, etc.

Personally, I tend to promote a mix of mid-range to luxury properties (generally between 3- and 5-star hotels), since that’s the range I tend to work within for my own travels.

I also find it helpful to provide my audience with options that they can work with depending on their individual budgets. That said, you’ll never see me reviewing 1-star properties, hostels, etc, because those simply don’t align with my brand/preferences.

Another factor that will determine your booking.com affiliate commission rates is the number of nights people book. In short, the longer someone stays at a property you’re promoting, the more you’ll earn.

For this reason, it’s wise to encourage your readership to plan multiple-night stays. From my personal experience thus far, people tend to book stays anywhere from one to four nights most frequently (with the sweet spot being two). So the more you can interest people in booking multiple nights, the more success you’ll ultimately see.

Here are some easy ways to encourage multi-night stays:

• Include booking.com affiliate links in your multi-day travel itineraries – If your readers are planning to spend several days in a specific destination in the first place, you’re already halfway there.
• Discuss the pros of staying in a destination for more than one night – I actually did this in my Cinque Terre itinerary when I mentioned the issue of overtourism in the area. Encouraging visitors to stay for multiple nights is a good sustainable, slow-travel practice in general and it can also help infuse more tourist dollars into a destination that may actually need them. (Side Note: I genuinely feel passionate that people should spend more than one night in the Cinque Terre; this is just an example to illustrate my point!)
• Highlight the various hotel amenities – If people know that they can expect more than a bed and a nice view, they may be inclined to stay longer. (For example, maybe a property has a luxurious pool to soak in, a relaxing spa area that offers treatments, multiple restaurants to try over a few days, etc.)

Building up authority around specific topics/areas is a good practice when it comes to (travel) blogging in general, but it’s also an important part of making those booking.com commissions.

Why?

Well, the more content you have around a specific destination, the more authoritatively you’ll be perceived in the eyes of Google. And, as you probably already know, the more authority you build with Google, the more likely your articles are to rank.

For instance, since I have several ranking articles about Tuscany, I was able to rank for the most romantic wine hotels in Tuscany rather quickly.

Instead of writing one quick article about the best hotels in a destination, try building a little silo of content around that destination that can then help bolster the authority of your property-focused post.

Booking.com wants to make it as easy as possible for their affiliates to succeed. Ultimately, your financial success is their financial success!

For this reason, they offer a number of widgets that you can implement on your site to encourage more affiliate sales, from visually-focused tools to streamlined affiliate links. 

Here’s a look at the different widgets that you can integrate into your content: 

1. Affiliate Links – These are probably the most versatile of all the tools and the ones I use most often. Simply link to properties using your unique partner ID and start earning! Plus, in addition to linking directly to specific properties, you also have the ability to link to cities, regions, islands, landmarks, and more.
2. Banners – If you’d like to display the booking.com logo prominently on your website, the best way to do this is with a clickable banner. Banners are available in six different styles.
3. Deals finder – Everyone likes a good deal, right? The deals finder widget is a great way to target your sale-seeking audience with current properties offering discounts.
4. Search box – Sometimes users want the ability to research properties in a given area independently. In this case, the search box is a valuable tool that allows visitors to locate their own places to stay in a desired destination.
5. Inspiring search box** – If you’re looking to offer something a little more visually compelling to encourage independent property searching, the inspiring search box is just the thing. Featuring eye-catching destination photography, this visually-focused widget entices website visitors to click and locate their perfect property.
6. Map widget – For those seeking greater geographical context on a given destination, the map widget is an effective way to encourage users to do a property search.
7. Car Rental Widget – If you thought booking.com was just for hotels, think again! The car rental widget provides users with access to hundreds of car rental suppliers in over 60k locations!
8. WordPress plugins – Since booking.com wants to provide a seamless experience for bloggers, they even offer the convenience of customizable plug-ins for WordPress sites.
9. Review Score Widget – Booking.com understands the power of social proof. With the review score widget, users can read reviews and scores left by other travelers to help inform their own booking decisions.

**According to booking.com, the inspiring search box is the top-performing widget.

Since there’s a lot to digest here, I recommend experimenting with one or two tools at first so that you can A/B test and see what works best in boosting your booking.com affiliate commission rates. Personally, I’ve found that affiliate links (particularly in the form of clickable CTA buttons) tend to work best on my site.

However, I’ve recently started experimenting with the map widget more and plan to start implementing some of the other tools as well. 

People make purchasing decisions based on emotions, not on facts. It’s one thing to try and sell someone on all the nifty features of a hotel, but it’s quite another to make them feel something on an emotional level. Show, don’t tell.

Undeniably, one of the best ways to get your message across is with beautiful imagery of the properties you’re writing about. Don’t just tell your readers about the beautiful view they’ll have from the hotel pool; make them gasp with breathtaking pictures of it.

After all, “a picture says a thousand words,” as the old adage goes. It may sound corny or even cliché, but it’s also true. High-quality imagery is one of the best ways to elicit an emotional response from your readers which will then persuade them to click that “Book a Stay” button.

Plus, beautiful photos will help keep people actively engaged on your posts for longer, meaning they’ll be more inclined to book through your links.

In turn, more time on page encourages more click-throughs and lowers your bounce rate in the process (double win)!

Now, this is all well and good if you happen to have a lot of property photos on hand, but it becomes trickier when you don’t. The good news is, once you reach a certain financial level with booking.com, they’ll let you use their photos in your posts, provided you credit them properly.

Unfortunately, however, you’ll need to prove yourself to them first (i.e. by making a lot of sales). While I did find this disheartening once I was accepted into the program and received the email response below, I’m using it as motivation for the future:

Generally, I like to include as many of my own photos as I can, but this isn’t always possible. Until you reach that magical threshold of sales, you’ll have to get a little creative.

Currently, when I’m lacking in the picture department, I embed property photos from Instagram and/or occasionally use stock photography that I pay for.

Using high-quality imagery isn’t just important for the posts themselves, but also for promoting those posts on Pinterest!

Remember, Pinterest is a “visual discovery platform,” and although it’s often (wrongfully) lumped into the “social media” bucket, it’s actually a search engine. Think of Pinterest like Google for photos/graphics. Just as you want to rank on Google for specific search terms, you also want your pins to “rank” on Pinterest. The more compelling you can make those pins that lead to your posts housing those precious affiliate links, the more likely people will be to click over from Pinterest and actually read them.

Personally, I use Canva to design all of my pins and I think it’s the best platform out there for this, hands-down. If you’re not already familiar, Canva is graphic-design platform which allows you to create so many different types of visual content, from pins, to presentations, to posters, to YouTube thumbnails.

If you’re not super design- or tech-savvy (or if the idea of PhotoShop is hella intimidating), Canva is perfect. It’s filled with tons of easy-to-use, plug-and-play templates that you can choose from. To be completely honest, I’m obsessed with Canva. In fact, I use it for anything and everything that needs to be designed for my business – from pins, to Instagram Story backgrounds, to media kits, to Reel covers, and more.

This all said, I did want to add in a little disclaimer about Google versus Pinterest as it pertains to your booking.com affiliate commission rates. While both search engines can give you traffic which can ultimately lead to affiliate sales, Google is arguably the more important one to focus on of the two platforms.

Why?

It all harkens back to the buyer’s journey. When someone types a long-tail keyword into Google, they’re looking for a highly-specific answer to a problem that you can help them solve.

Pinterest, on the other hand, is more geared toward awareness-stage content, which is why it’s referred to as a visual discovery platform. People tend to visit Pinterest to discover new ideas for the first time, not necessarily to make immediate purchasing decisions (as they’d be more inclined to do with Google).

However, creating high-quality pins for your hotel-related posts is still worth your time. That’s because Pinterest is a hugely popular platform, meaning more exposure for your content. After all, it’s hard to argue the fact that getting more eyeballs on your content is always a good idea!

Besides, even if someone doesn’t book a hotel stay through your post initially, they may pin your article to reference later. Although you wouldn’t get the affiliate sale for that individual (given the one-session cookie), the re-pin will give you additional exposure to a new audience who may be interested in booking.

Learning and then mastering each of the different strategies in this guide will take some time, so don’t beat yourself up if you’re not raking in the commissions right away! Instead, give yourself a few months to get acclimated to these different concepts and create corresponding content that incorporates them.

Still struggling after months of inactivity on your links and/or zero commissions?

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Are you meeting people where they are in the decision stage of the buyer’s journey?
• Are you infusing your articles with long-tail keywords you’ve researched that you can actually rank for?
• Are you promoting high-quality properties and encouraging visitors to stay for more than one night?
• Have you written enough content about your chosen destination to build authority with Google or have you just created a one-off post?
• Are you taking advantage of the available features that booking.com offers its affiliates or are you only using one?
• Are you creating image-rich posts with high-quality photography that inspire people to travel to the destination(s) you’re covering?

No hard feelings if you weren’t able to answer these questions how you originally hoped! Instead, use the info you’ve gathered to point you in the direction of where you need to go next to make a successful sale.

As with anything else, affiliate marketing can take time. However, as you begin incorporating the various strategies in this guide into your blogging efforts, it’s only a matter of time before you’ll start to see success with your booking.com affiliate commission rates.

I hope this guide has given you a clear way forward in your affiliate journey with booking.com. Whether you’re just starting out as an affiliate or you’ve been in the game but you’re struggling to see results, your strategic effort and patience will pay off.

What questions can I answer for you about the booking.com affiliate program? Let me know in the comments below!