One of the staunchest supporters of travel affiliate marketing, Sandals Resorts, is set to launch a new luxury tour company, Island Routes. Although details about the program are still under wraps, if past history is any indication, Sandals’ new tour operator could bring in a strong and steady income stream to those travel affiliates that […]
Expedia Affiliate Network Ratchets-Up Support For Travel Affiliates
The overall picture for Expedia, Inc. may be a bit cloudy and turbulent, but the opposite seems to be true for Expedia Affiliate Network (EAN), and more specifically, the business prospects for the thousands of travel affiliates that are members of the online travel agency’s (OTA’s) affiliate network. Expedia Affiliate Network has been on somewhat […]
Flickr – A Next-Generation Online Travel Affiliate Tool
Wouldn’t it be cool to have an online travel guidebook that is based on the collective wisdom of hundreds of thousands of like minded travelers? Well, researchers at the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University may have identified a way to do just that. With the aid of a supercomputer, these scientists analyzed some […]
Huge New Cruise Ships – Christen the Cruise Affiliate Sales Channel?
The Cruise Industry should start taking a VERY close look at Cruise Affiliate Programs. Carnival Cruise Lines has… To spur growth, cruise lines have historically relied on the introduction of new ships to their fleets. The next twelve months will set an industry record – five of the big cruise lines will introduce their largest […]
Things I Think I Think – May 11 , 2009
1. I ran across some stunning statistics in Mobile in Travel 2009, a recent white paper on the impact of mobile on the travel industry… 3.3 billion people actively us SMS; that’s over twice as many people as the 1.4 billion people that use the Internet 2.5 times as many people send a text message […]
Delta Air Lines, Commissions and Distribution – Déjà Vu All Over Again
Delta Air Lines (DL) stunned some folks in the travel and travel affiliate marketing industries on May 6th when it announced that they would pay a special 10% commission on all flights and fare classes on bookings made by June 30th for travel through December 15th, 2009 from New York City area airports to Mexico, […]
The ‘Network’ Is Where the Money Is! – Part 1
Pop Quiz! Question 1…Quick, name the largest (and arguably most controversial) investments in the travel and affiliate marketing industries in the last twelve months? If you answered the $250 million cash investment in HomeAway, Inc., by several well respected VCs and Google’s restructuring of its $3.1 billion DoubleClick Performics acquisition respectively, you’d be right. Pop […]
Travel Affiliate Marketing in the US and UK – One Industry Separated by a Common Language
George Bernard Shaw famously quipped that the Americans and British are essentially “one people separated by a common language.” That tongue-in-cheek observation holds similar currency when comparing how well affiliate marketing performs in the travel sector in each country. Econsultancy’s recent studies of the US and UK affiliate marketing industries revealed some very interesting industry-wide […]