How I Monetised My Travel Blog In 90 Days (And You Can, Too!)

I’ll be completely honest – when I launched my travel blog 18 months ago, I fully intended to monetise it from the start.

I get asked the same questions over and over in my DMs. It’s much easier to publish a guide once and share the link than to write a full essay each time someone asks “where should I stay in London?“.

However, let’s be clear: the main advantage to running your own website is income diversification. Social media platforms and algorithms are volatile and often hard to monetise. You don’t really own your social media accounts, whereas your travel blog is yours.

Today, I’ll reveal how I monetised this travel blog in just 90 days using Stay22.

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links for products or services that I personally endorse and love. Should you make a purchase, I may make a commission at no additional cost to you. Thank you for supporting Jess Eats The World!

How I monetised my travel blog in only 90 days using Stay22

Launching my travel blog

I launched my travel blog at the start of 2024. With social media features and algorithms changing all the time, I didn’t want all my eggs in one basket…

So, I purchased my domain, set up my hosting, and got to work! The first month was spent on annoying, boring, and time-consuming web design tasks, but by the first week of February, I had finally published my first 5 posts!

I already had experience of running blogs in the past, so I knew that SEO and affiliate links were crucial to monetising my travel blog.

I ensured my posts were not only informative but also well-structured, and I quickly looked into joining affiliate programs. I’d been using hotel booking websites for years, so it only felt natural that I joined their direct affiliate programs, right?

Wrong.

As I published more posts, my readership started growing but I made no money from hotel bookings. However, I thought this was normal for a new blog…

Then, I discovered Stay22

I started hearing about Stay22 from other blogger friends, raving about how much money they were making after implementing it on their websites. So I looked into it.

Stay22 aggregates several affiliate programs: Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, Kayak, and Vrbo (and now they also cover Agoda and GetYourGuide!).

I learned that I wouldn’t need to worry about which links to add to my posts because of Roam – Stay22’s built-in AI that figures out which booking platforms your readers prefer, and redirects them there automatically!

The icing on the cake was that I didn’t have to change any of the existing affiliate links on my live posts. The Stay22 script automatically converts all existing affiliate links to Stay22 links. Perfect!

Also, Stay22 offer a $100 bonus to new affiliates who sign up through the referral program once they achieve 100 confirmed bookings!

This is a great way to give your earnings a little boost! Learn more and sign up here.

Immediate results

It seemed like I had nothing to lose, and potentially a lot to gain with switching to Stay22. So, I did.

Reader, I started making commissions from hotel bookings straight away.

After installing the script on my website at the end of March, I quickly saw my first bookings roll in. By the end of April, I had earned commission from 11 bookings. I couldn’t believe it!

How Stay22 works + Customisation

As you can see, Stay22 was a game-changer for me to monetise my travel blog in such a short time.

Stay22 has various features that you can implement on your website, and the program is highly customisable. You can opt in or out of specific features, enabling you to test and try out various combinations to maximise your blog earnings.

Just ask the Stay22 team to help you with customising your script (their customer support is great!)

NOVA AI Booking Agent

This is Stay22’s most unique feature, and a favourite among travel bloggers for its potential to increase conversions.

NOVA is an AI-powered intent-based monetisation tool – it detects when a reader is showing strong purchase intent, and opens a new tab for a car or hotel booking website in the background. This tab offer is optimised based on the pages and content the user was browsing.

This feature is not obtrusive, as NOVA is only triggered once every 40 days on average, per user/browser.

If you’d like to keep your direct booking links with your current affiliate partner, you can sign up to Stay22 and use NOVA only as a standalone feature, without converting your existing links.

Let Me Allez (LMA) Script

Stay22’s LMA Script makes it a breeze to switch over to the program and for managing your affiliate links.

Once you install the script, all your existing affiliate links are automatically converted to smart Stay22 links for your entire website – so you don’t have to change anything manually!

In addition to this, Stay22’s LMA Script works with links to any of its partners (currently Booking.com, Expedia, Kayak, Hotels.com, Vrbo, Agoda and GetYourGuide – and they’re constantly expanding their list!). This allows you to manage affiliate income for several different partners in one place.

This is also customisable. For example, I decided to keep my GetYourGuide affiliate separate, as I was already part of their direct affiliate program.

Interactive Maps

This is another one of my favourite Stay22 features, and I find it extremely helpful for “Where to stay” guides.

You can create interactive maps for any location, showing any available accommodation options in the area, and pinning your own recommendations. I find this adds a great interactive element to hotel recommendations, and I use it often on my posts.

Spark

Spark goes a step further and scans your content for opportunities to include affiliate links within the text (Stay22 report an average of 2.7 links per article).

Again, this is customisable. For instance, I have chosen to disable Spark on my website so that I can have full control over which links appear on each of my pages and posts.

Roam

Roam is Stay22’s smart AI engine that’s automatically enabled with the LMA script. Roam is always working in the background, analysing user behaviour to determine what actions may lead to a higher chance of conversion.

For example, it uses geolocation to redirect the user to their native version of the booking website (ie. .com, .co.uk, etc), and fixes broken links.

It also uses data points to determine if the user prefers looking at a search page or a landing page, and the user’s preferred supplier (eg. Expedia versus Booking.com), redirecting them automatically.

Final Thoughts

Now, after running this travel blog for 18 months, I can definitely say that Stay22 was a game-changer to monetising my passion for helping people plan their travels!

It would’ve been much more difficult to monetise my travel blog if I hadn’t found Stay22 – let alone in just 90 days!

Though, the kicker is that I could have monetised my travel blog even sooner – had I implemented the Stay22 script from day one!

If you’re a travel blogger looking to maximise your affiliate income with little effort, I highly recommend giving Stay22 a try! There is no approval process and you can generate your Stay22 script in seconds.

Learn more and sign up here to get started and grab your $100 bonus once you achieve 100 confirmed bookings with Stay22!