Huge drop after changed from Bookings to Hotelscombined

I have recently updated my affiliate hotel program provider from bookings to HotelsCombined as I noticed that the bookings prices for the majority of the hotels I featured were much higher than alternative programmes out there.

The beauty of bookings is that you can get a customized iframeable url with your own stylesheet implementation free of charge, therefore most websurfers do not realise that they have actually left your site

With HotelsCombined theres none of that but they check over 22 of the biggest hotel databases and show you a comparison of the prices for all of them in one shot. This is great as you can almost guarantee to your visitors the lowest price for all hotels featured on your site. You do not have the stylesheet and its clear that you have left your site when you run the check etc. They do however pay a very nice 70% of the commission to you as opposed to 25% from bookings.

So, HotelsCombined seemed a nice option for my site as instead of 36 hotels listed for the city I feature in my site they have 88 hotels, all sortable by price. They even take the hotel info from many sites and you can eailsy make unique content of that. You can even make a search box for each hotel, just with checkin date, checkout date and search button customised to fit your site.

All very nice, but the problem I have is that my affiliate earnings have plumetted since making the changeover, I was getting around 20 a day for a few days of my Adwords campaign from the bookings affiliate implementation but now am getting nothing from the HotelsCombined. I can see clicks to their pages but no sales, therefore no income.

Does anyone have any positive feedback or success stories from HotelsCombined? Am I throwing away my traffic and thus my Adwords cash? I see from their site that HotelsCombined will one day introduce a similar unbranded approach to their pages just like the bookings system and this would be a better implementation for my site(s), has anyone heard such rumours?

I really hope that this affiliate will pay off as i have switched all my hotel listings over to the hotelsCombined system and hope that I have just not wasted my time/effort/cash.

PS: Strange that nobody mentions this affiliate on such a big forum as digitalpoint. I wait with baited breath.

 

I have now put back the Bookings.com affiliate links in all of my hotel listings, has nobody here really ever heard of HotelsCombined. (I am not connected with them) - They seem to have such a good payuot rate that I am amazed that nobody is talking about them. With over 250 clicks from my site to their listings I was shocked to see that not a single sale had been generated. Only income is the 10$ joining bonus.

 

Hi,

I have signed up with hotelscombined a few days ago and have had a 25% click through rate. (although we are very focussed on one market) - only 8 clicks though.

The problem is, that although we have 2 leads, it appears that the commission earned was 42c per sale.

I have asked them to clarify this (as there is no explanation of commission on their website), but have not received an answer. (in fact have not received an answer in several days to many questions that have been asked.)

While the click through rate is much better, the earnings have gone from $10 - $20 on average to 42c per lead. This is extremely strange.

I think that the 70% commission is 70% of the earnings on their affilitate programs (i.e. they earn $10 from "rates to go" -who take out their booking fee and commission- then hotelscombined take out their fees and then you get 70% of that.)

That is my assumption, but I am still waiting on clarification. I will post when I get this confirmed.

I will stick with it for a few weeks to see how it goes, and if it is no good, I will change back to the old affiliates. (or to new ones - not one of the affiliates I have tried answer my emails in a reasonable time - I have been waiting several weeks for a response from one of them, and so I have changed to hotelscombined.)

Anyway, enough rambling. I will post when I get some results

 

Here is the response:

"The affiliate commission is paid as a percentage of the per click fee collected from travel sites compared on HotelsCombined.com.


Average per click fee at the moment is 60 US cents.
As an affiliate you would earn on average 42 cents for each click your visitors make to the compared web sites.


Our strength is in providing the best comparison tool to end consumers.
Most of our users come back to our site on regular basis and having 1 year repeat action cookie in place greatly increases your earnings. We have many affiliates who've switched from booking based affiliate programs and have been able to earn more using our system.


The statistics of where the visitors searched and which engine they eventually clicked to is not available at the moment."

So it looks like you earn 42c per click (as opposed to $10 per sale with other affiliate programs.)

Still asked for more clarification. Sounds like a PPC site more than a commission based affiliate.

 

I think you would make more with a good affiliate program for travel on your own.

 

any suggestions?

 

Sounds like hotels combined just give 42c per click, while they keep the commissions on any confirmed hotels.

Does this sound right?

Still waiting for a reply on whether we will get commissions.

 

Have received a reply.

The system is a pay per click system (42c per click).

You are better off going with a commission based system until they fix this.

Until then, I will stick with others.