Traveling industry suffered a major blow a couple of years ago, when the COVID-19 started to gain its momentum that has been lasting up until now. Lack of proper treatment, lockdowns even in the most democratic countries, globalization put on a halt, inadequate supply of basic goods (e.g., toilet paper), and severed tourism routes took their toll on people’s ability to travel.
Despite all of that, the traveling niche is on the road again, and it goes firmly uphill, just like we expected earlier. Curiosity might have killed the cat, but it is also at the core of the renaissance period the industry witnesses today. People voyage faraway not only out of curiosity, but due to a lot of reasons, intertwined in the most complex ways imaginable:
- Distant relatives
- Career opportunities
- Sources of inspiration
- Escape from routine
- Source of reward
- Personal growth
- Challenging oneself
- Political events
- Relationships improvement
- New acquaintances
- Knowledge growth
- New life beginning
- Impact making
- Medical prescriptions
- Perspective & comparison
- Sport events
- Business trips
- Religious causes
- Cultural awe
Do you like traveling yourself, and what are the reasons for thinking so? Even if you are against traveling, the fact is – it remains among the most popular verticals in 2022. Therefore, unless you are determined to miss out on a great opportunity to earn, we cordially invite you to learn more about tourism specifics in 2022 and why this niche refuses to fall into oblivion.
Travel Vertical Basics
Traveling vertical is a superset, housing multiple sub-verticals:
- Transportation (train, plane, liner, bus)
- Accommodation (hotels, motels, inns, villas)
- Sightseeing (extreme sports, city tours, river excursions)
- Travel Insurance (medicine, property, luggage)
- Travel Finances (credit cards, sim cards, money exchanges)
- Rental Services (vehicles, bikes, equipment, suits)
- Traveling Goods (electronics, souvenirs, bedding, snacks)
Traveling niche contributes almost $6,000,000,000,000 to global GDP. The vertical is perfectly white-hat and has low media coverage. Nonetheless, the competition is stiff, worsened by the traditional restrictions on the Branding, Spam, Toolbar, or iFrame traffic. Driving traffic from forbidden sources may result in account bans without any chance to withdraw the earnings.
The advertisers also spend a lot of money on contextual and targeted advertising, which additionally narrows the focus of the affiliates during ad campaigns. Furthermore, traveling is characterized by its seasonality, with the Europeans, for instance, enjoying their holidays predominantly in summer. Seasonality can be caused by natural (climate) and institutional (vacations) reasons. It does not necessarily imply something bad, however, some associated issues are difficult to overcome, namely high turnover or low seasonal pay rates, that do affect the quality of service.
Why Traveling?
Starting off the beginning of 2021, the demand for traveling has been on the rise. Rising demand requires bigger supply that has been severely damaged by the COVID-19 pandemic earlier. According to the Google Destination Insights, the biggest demand comes from first-tier countries, respectively: Germany, the USA, the UK, France, Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, Italy, and some others.
Google Travel Insights, the superset for Destination Insights, does not account for the Russian Federation – a large Tier-2 GEO. This is most likely due to geopolitical reasons, yet the population spends a lot on traveling in this country.
Planning the Campaign
Regarding the political reasons or any other campaign hazards, you can always examine the availability of a country to the citizens from another country using various travel requirement maps easily found online, e.g., Sherpa:
Pick any desirable GEO, alongside the destination point, and learn the general information on what is needed to enter the country you have selected (if needed). In this particular picture, if you start off as a German, who has vaccinated from COVID-19, you are free to enter anything, outside China and Ukraine, plus North Korea, but the latter is a complicated case. When it comes to seasonality, a useful map, provided by the Culture Trip website, can come in handy:
Here, you can learn the high and low seasons for any particular country throughout the year. In a nutshell, the map turns green (high) during summer and red (low) during winter, at least the non-equatorial parts of the globe. The traveling niche possesses two unpleasing characteristics: low margin and high conversion period. In other words, you have to wait approximately 3 months before you start making profit of around 1.6% on plane tickets, provided you established your campaign properly.
However, the market is less saturated than 3 years ago, plus there are other micro-verticals like travel policies (17%), car sharing (7%), or accommodation (4%):
| Travel Policies | 10–25 % |
| Excursions | 3–12 % |
| Car Sharing | 4–10 % |
| Bus Tickets | 3–9.9 % |
| Parking | 7 % |
| Transfers | 4–7 % |
| Package Holiday | 3,3–6 % |
| Train Tickets | 3–6 % |
| Accommodation | 3–5 % |
| Bike Rentals | 4 % |
| Cruises | 3,5 % |
| Flight Tickets | 1.3–1.8 % |
| Flight Delay Amendments | 5 Euro |
| 3rd Party Liability Insurance | 300–350 Rubles |
Payout rates by TravelPayouts.com
The payout period delay of a whole quarter of the year is among the main reasons not to give chase to hot/special offers that tend to burn twice as bright, but half as long, than other humbler offers. Additionally, high payout rate usually comes with higher costs. Commence your campaign wide, capturing different sub-verticals and then narrow your focus down to the most profitable ones, depending on the traffic sources you have.
It is also a good idea to know the sharing of domestic and international traffic, in relation to any particular destination. In this regard, Google Hotel Insights is an invaluable tool, which is a part of the aforementioned Travel Insights tool:
Knowing the interest demonstrated by internal market and other countries can help you to plan your campaigns and lenders accordingly: choosing the language, usage of currencies, color selection etc. For example, Arabic countries read from right to left and consider the green color sacred. Consequently, your lander layout in comparison to the European-oriented one will differ substantially. As for the colors, using green in this case brings both the opportunity (positive bias) and the threat (accidental blasphemy).
Performance and KPI
Cost-per-Action (CPA) & Cost-per-Click (CPC) are your bread and butter, when it comes to traveling niche. The difference here is that in case of the former, the lead has to buy something for the affiliate to earn his premium, while in case of the latter, the lead simply has to reach the provider’s website. One of the most popular model of attribution in traveling is Last Click, or Last Cookie Win.
The model is imperfect, because the target audience has the following portrait:
- 24-35 years old
- Women are presented slightly more
- Long decision-making process
Last cookie win is generally aimed at impulse buying. It is perfect when we talk about souvenirs, but for careful voyage planning it might simply be not enough as many components are involved during this kind of preparation. For instance, your lead might have come across an enticing offer at winter, but is held back by 9/5 work at office. By the time of summer vacation, he will most likely reach the offer that got his attention by some other means, yet the main contribution in this case will be on the first click side.
Among the most popular traffic sources are: Pop-ads, Domain redirects, Push-ads, Search ads, Teasers, Social networks, Display, Forums, Contextual ads. The last one is considered to be among the most efficient ones, although relatively expensive.
Conclusion
Traveling vertical brings back its former pre-pandemic glory. The market re-emerges with ever-growing demand. People always eager to travel, because voyaging afar can give them a break, refresh their thinking, improve their relationships, provide the desired solitude, give new knowledge, or simply bring joy – the reasons are many. Consequently, no matter what, the vertical resurrects like a Phoenix even in most desperate times. After all, people have been traveling since the creation, and we are still fond of audacious explorers and daring adventurers.
Tier-1 and tier-2 lists are the best picks for potential travelers, simply because the population in there have some spare money. Besides the obvious choices like Germany, France, or the UK, there are also such countries as Russia, India, or Brazil. Yet, the ad campaigns are far from being universal and can either go bust in a group of GEOs or make a bang in another ones, depending on the season and institutional practices. What is legal in the US might not be legal in Russia and vice versa.
Traveling has multiple sub-verticals, and the general approach foreshadows poor returns. However, the wide-scale is more than appropriate at the beginning to figure out the most profitable niches for you to specialize in. Highest payout rates of travel insurance are not necessarily better than flight tickets and, in fact, are often offset but higher costs and competition. Try being Jack-of-all-trades, that slowly narrows down his focus.
Rely on multiple tools that the internet has granted to you, like Google Travel Insights, Sherpa travel requirement map, Seasonality maps, and of course the old friend of any affiliate – the Split-testing. We discourage you from cutting the corners here, because only with the help of split-tests can you confirm or bust any hypotheses that can help you to hit the golden vein. Do not also forget that traveling vertical is infamous for large payout lagging of approximately 3 months. So remain patient and collected, the profit will find you eventually.
If you want to reach new GEOs and audiences, maybe it is all waiting for you on Telegram? We’ve prepared some material about Telegram audiences. What are the messenger’s users like this year? How old they are, what they do, and what they are interested in!
