Travelpayouts Review After 3 Years and How I Make $576 Per Month
A blog that pays the bills while you’re on a beach, on a farm, or in a café.
Isn’t that every travel blogger’s dream?
It happened to me sooner than I expected. It was the end of March. I was doing my monthly income tracking when I opened Travelpayouts and saw $963.05!
My target for the whole month had been $500. And it wasn’t a fluke. The next month I earned $849.22. The month after that, $697.26. On average, I’ve earned $576 a month this year, even after a Google update cut my traffic by 42% from its April peak.
Most of this surge came from Drive, an AI tool Travelpayouts launched this February. I have one post, for example, that earned $9.71 in 2025. And in six months with Drive, the same post earned $1,009.70!
This Travelpayouts review is for bloggers who already have a site, some traffic, and commercial posts, and who want to know whether Drive can monetize those posts better. If you don’t have a website yet, I’ll show you how I use Travelpayouts links on Instagram instead. But I’ll also tell you when Travelpayouts is not for you.
Disclosure. This post is sponsored by Travelpayouts. It also contains referral links, which means I may earn a bonus if you sign up through them, at no extra cost to you. I only recommend products I actually use, love, and trust. Opinions are 100% my own. Full disclosure here.
What Travelpayouts Is (and What It Isn’t)
Travelpayouts is an affiliate platform for travel bloggers and content creators. One sign-up gives you access to 90+ travel affiliate programs.
Instead of applying separately to Booking.com, GetYourGuide, Viator, Klook, Agoda, Trip.com, DiscoverCars, and Tripadvisor, you only need to sign up with Travelpayouts once, get approved brand by brand, and manage everything from one dashboard.
I’ve been running Happiness On The Way for three years now, and at some point you can only manage so many.
The more you spread yourself, the less you focus, and the less your income compounds.
With Travelpayouts, I manage one platform. With Drive, it got much easier, but I’ll show you why and how later.
Aside from Drive, here are the three things I love most about Travelpayouts:
- Easy-to-use interface. I’m a techy person, and even I get lost in Impact and CJ. With Travelpayouts, you can figure everything out in one sitting. Everything is where you’d expect it.
- Same rates as going direct, with full transparency. The commission is similar to the brand’s own affiliate program, and every program shows the rate (unlike Stay22). That’s why almost all my affiliate programs run through Travelpayouts now.
- Content Analytics. As your blog grows, analytics is your best friend, and no platform I’ve used comes close to Travelpayouts here. I used to do this manually, and it took me a whole weekend to work out which posts were converting. Now it takes me four clicks.
What Travelpayouts Is Not
Travelpayouts has a lot to offer bloggers and content creators, but it isn’t:
- a place for brand deals, partnerships or UGC work
- a general affiliate network like Amazon Associates, Awin or Impact
- an ad network that pays for displaying ads or generating clicks
- a paywall or subscription tool like Substack or Patreon
It also doesn’t bring you traffic. It monetizes the readers you already have.
Here’s where Travelpayouts sits in my monetization stack: Travelpayouts for most travel affiliates, Stay22 mostly for Booking.com, Mediavine for ads, Impact for non-travel affiliates, a very few direct affiliates like Worldpackers, and my own paid brand deals.
What I Actually Made in Three Years
I joined Travelpayouts back in March 2023. My first commission was $1.82, from a colleague booking a Hong Kong Octopus card. In October 2024, one Booking.com stay booked from my post paid me $329.35. Yes, affiliate income can get that insane.
2023 to 2026 earnings with Travelpayouts
| Year | Pageviews | Earned | Per 1,000 pageviews |
| 2023 (March to December) | 9,700 | $115.70 | $11.93 |
| 2024 | 152,000 | $1,248.32 | $8.21 |
| 2025 | 364,000 | $1,790.59 | $4.92 |
| 2026 (January to July) | 266,000 | $4,033.36 | $15.16 |
Look at the last column. From 2023 to 2025, traffic grew more than 37 times, but I earned less per thousand pageviews each year: $11.93, then $8.21, then $4.92. More traffic, worse monetization, because I was publishing and not linking properly.
In 2026, with Drive on and less traffic, it’s $16.46. More than three times what the same thousand pageviews earned last year.
2026 Travelpayouts earnings, month by month
| Month | Pageviews | Earned | Per 1,000 pageviews |
| January | 30,000 | $592.79 | $19.76 |
| February | 30,000 | $321.09 | $10.70 |
| March | 41,000 | $963.05 | $23.49 |
| April | 45,000 | $849.22 | $18.87 |
| May | 42,000 | $697.26 | $16.60 |
| June | 31,000 | $282.40 | $9.11 |
| July | 26,000 | $327.55 | $12.60 |
My March income was three times February’s on a third more traffic. April was a bit lower than March but still more than double February’s income.
Then traffic dropped through May, June, and July — down 42% from April’s peak by the end of July. I’d have earned far less if Drive hadn’t been on.
My Payouts
Bookings only count once the trip has happened and the brand confirms it, and anything confirmed by the end of a month is paid between the 11th and 20th of the next one. If your balance is under the minimum for your payout method ($50 on PayPal and $500 for bank transfer), it rolls over to the following month.
This year my average payout has been $715, across six payouts.
Monthly earnings show what was booked that month, including pending bookings for future trips. Payouts only pay out completed trips, so they include bookings from earlier months.
That covered everything at our house in the Philippines: bills, food, and the weekly restaurants and coffee shops. We own the house, so we don’t pay rent. Travelpayouts is roughly a third of my total income, which meant I could invest the rest. My blogging dream came true.
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Travelpayouts Drive and How It Doubled My Earnings
I published 29 posts this year. I now have a total of 162 posts on my blog. The manual links I placed myself earned $1,754.18 in the first seven months of 2026. That’s almost as much as all of 2025 ($1,790.59). Blogging really is a long-term game.
Then Drive added $2,279.18 on top of that. About 30% more than my manual links, except I didn’t place a single one of these.
Drive went live in February 2026, and I switched it on the day it launched.
So what is Drive?
Drive is Travelpayouts’ AI tool that reads your existing posts and monetizes them for you. It runs on the same script as the rest of Travelpayouts, so if the script is already on your site, you just switch it on. If not, you paste it once; I’ll show you where in the setup section.
Drive is what Emerald, LinkSwitcher, and Booking Booster became, combined into one.
Here’s how it makes you money:
- Turns plain links into affiliate links. You don’t need to generate a link for every hotel and tour you mention. Drive finds the plain booking links already in your posts and converts them.
- Adds links and recommendation blocks where readers actually click. It turns travel keywords into links and drops a relevant recommendations block into the article.
- Shows a relevant travel offer in a background tab. This is Targeted Offers. It’s the equivalent of Stay22’s Nova.
Note If you also run Stay22 with Nova on: a reader can get two background tabs. In my experience Stay22’s tends to be Booking.com and Travelpayouts tends to be GetYourGuide, Viator or Klook, so they don’t fight over the same booking. But it’s two tabs.
Would I want that as a reader? Not especially. Do I keep it on? Yes, because those are readers who were going to leave without booking anything, and the tab is relevant to the page they were on.
If you’d rather protect the reading experience, switch it off. You can turn each Drive feature on or off separately, and exclude brands too. I excluded Airalo from link switching because I did a paid brand partnership with them.
Before and After Drive
In my experience, Drive does the most for informational posts, especially if your commercial posts are already optimized, as mine were.
Informational post (best X, itineraries, guides). In 2025, before Drive, one post had 4,365 visits and made $9.71 from four bookings. This year it’s had 66,521 visits, 93 bookings, $687.38 confirmed, and another $322.32 pending.
Per thousand visits, that’s $2.22 last year and $15.18 this year. There are hardly any booking links in the post itself, so almost everything it earns comes from Drive: Targeted Offers, keyword links, and the recommendations block.
Commercial post (a specific experience, or a roundup with booking intent). These earn about the same with or without Drive, because the links are already there. One post made $326.89 this year (almost the same as last year), all of it through links I placed myself.
Travelpayouts vs Direct Programs vs Stay22
Travelpayouts vs direct programs. You can usually negotiate a higher rate with a direct program. But Travelpayouts rates match the direct rate, and beat it whenever a brand runs a promo through the platform. If you expect a lot of conversions with one brand, say GetYourGuide, Viator, or Agoda, go direct with that one. Otherwise, keep them all with Travelpayouts. Going direct also gets you creator perks, like free tours and extra bonuses, which the platform doesn’t.
Travelpayouts vs Stay22. A lot of bloggers worry these two can’t coexist. I’ve tested it, and they can. The one conflict I’ve seen is between Travelpayouts’ link switching and Stay22’s link swap, so run only one of those.
Travelpayouts has far more travel brands than Stay22. Stay22’s advantage used to be Nova, which is what Targeted Offers now does in Drive. These days I find Stay22 converts better for Booking.com, and tours and other accommodation convert better with Travelpayouts. Drive and Stay22 run together on my site. I go deeper on it in my Stay22 review.
Who Travelpayouts Is Not For
Travelpayouts is not for you if your content isn’t about travel. It’s also not a get-rich-quick scheme. It can only monetize existing content that already has views, so if you’re just starting, you’ll have to wait until those views are in.
You can monetize a travel website, social media (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Threads), Pinterest, and a newsletter. But you can only turn on Drive if you have a website, and two of its features, keyword links and recommendation blocks, only work on pages in English.
How to Set It Up
- Sign up through my link for free in under two minutes. If you sign up using my link, you’ll get The $50 Travelpayouts Playbook + up to a $100 bonus.
- Add your site as a project. You can add a website or a social media page. Travelpayouts reviews it within about 24 hours.
- Apply to programs. Most brands connect instantly. Some, Booking.com especially, review your site and can decline if it isn’t a regularly updated travel site. You can always reapply.
- Install the Drive script. Copy the code from the Drive page and paste it into your site’s head. On WordPress, a plugin like WPCode does it. Wix and Squarespace have a custom-code box. If you use WP Rocket, add the script to its exceptions. Then click “I’ve pasted the code,” and Travelpayouts checks it.
- Switch on Drive features. They’re all on by default. Each one can be turned off separately, and you can exclude brands you work with directly.
- Wait. Drive learns for a few weeks, and changes appear gradually. Bookings only confirm after the trip happens, so don’t judge it at week two.
- Optimize using Content Analytics. Once bookings come in, see which posts convert and add your own links where readers are already clicking.
How To Get Your $100 Bonus: Get $25 once Drive is installed and you’ve confirmed your first $50. You’ll get an additional $25 at your first $100 earned, and $50 at $1,000. Up to $100 total.
How I use Travelpayouts links with Social Media
You don’t need a website to use the links. I share Travelpayouts links through ManyChat. When I post a reel about a specific tour or stay, I ask people to comment a keyword, and ManyChat sends them a DM with the Travelpayouts link. The link goes straight to the booking page for that exact tour or hotel, so the person who asked is one tap from booking.
I find this works better than a link in bio, because the DM link is the exact thing they saw in the reel, not a menu of everything I’ve ever recommended.
I make the links with the Travelpayouts link generator and add a SubID to each one, so I can see in the dashboard which reel it came from.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Travelpayouts legit?
Yes. I’ve been paid by them for three years, and every payout is on time. Their support is the best I’ve dealt with on any affiliate platform. When I had a missing Booking.com commission, they chased it for a month and then credited it themselves. The company behind it is Go Travel Un Limited, registered in Hong Kong in August 2011, with a team spread across several countries.
Does Travelpayouts Drive slow down your site?
Travelpayouts says the script loads asynchronously, which is Google’s own recommendation for third-party scripts. The posts I’ve tested with Drive running have passed Core Web Vitals on mobile and desktop.
Can I use Travelpayouts with Mediavine or Stay22?
Yes. Travelpayouts can run alongside Stay22, Mediavine, and Ezoic. I run mine with Mediavine and Stay22.
Is Travelpayouts worth it in 2026?
Yes, if you have a site with posts people book from. I’d sign up again and turn Drive on, especially if you don’t have time for a content audit.
Start Earning From the Posts You’ve Already Written
If you have a site and a few posts people plan trips from, sign up for Travelpayouts, add your site, and switch Drive on tonight. It’s free, it takes under two minutes, and you get up to $100 in bonuses as a new partner.
