Booking.com affiliate review: business plan
First I thought this was an unflexible ocean cruise. Now I have to say they have a transparent, easy to use system with acceptable conversion rates. There are hundred thousends bookings per day, so they are one of the biggest agencies all over the World.
+ They protect their brand extremly hard sometimes. It sounds too much in 2010.
- They are not very flexible and innovative. That’s all. We are expecting a much more flexible and sophisticated automatic commission distribution system. Direct oration, plain speech, fairly fair play! 
- Bad reality: when my visitor do not include my unique affiliate ID number in the link to Booking.com we won’t get any commission for bookings made via this link. They remember only the brand BOOKING.COM, it is absolutely normal. It could happen every day.
+ Good vision: we are lucky if we have a lot of instant bookings. They could pay extra for good partners for this kind of “free advertising”. They have a very profitable business so they could manage it in the near future. This is donation and fairness together.
Their usability is good enough so we can recommend to join the affiliate system without any stupid doubt in 2010.
+ Payments are made on a monthly basis, 30-60 days after the bookings have been finalised.
+ Working with iframes and white label implementation can solve some problems.
+ 0,5-2 % – These percentages in conversions are good enough to attract entrepreneurs, bloggers.
The biggest partner of booking.com: Combined price collector and reservation fow worldwide destinations HERE – Searching all the best travel sites at once and find the cheapest price by a very clever system. The pay affiliate commission too, it was the highest earlier.
Try to find some offers first, find out more browsing their pages:
Easy to use Online Hotel Reservation Worldwide – best rate guarantee HERE.
Contract: www.booking.com/general.en.html?tmpl=docs/partner_print:
5.1 Commission split
5.1.1 Booking.com will pay the Affiliate for each Materialised Transaction the Commission, by using a percentage commission split for the number of Materialised Transactions, in accordance with the following table (the “Percentage Commission Split”):
Materialised Transactions per month Percentage Commission Split (only for booking after validation, ~ 2 months later)
0-50 25%
more than 50 30%
more than 150 35%
more than 500 40%
Payments and commission categories are good.
My first goal was 0,5 % in conversions rates. I could reach 1% now. I think this is nice enough.
“As far as the conversion rate is concerned, we have much higher conversion than 0.5-1%. It would not be correct to give you a European average because each user base is different. For a Hungarian user base, the conversion rate is around 2%, but much higher for UK and Northern Europe for example.”
What is about cookie or IP address? If visitor must reserve when he first time visit booking.com or not? What if he reserve hotel some days latter?
Booking.com conversion rates are nice, but they should pay some more for good partners, e.g. lead extra, returning customers (in one year), cookie grant…
We wont get a customer list, 2,5% commission is weak without long term results.
“..enhanced self-service Partner Center..”
“As our Partner you have 24/7 access to the great (new) features enabling you to have complete control over your integration, find solutions to possible issues and monitor your statistics. ”
“Your partner id is 41918..”
Did you get this email?
Does it work? Or it was just a virus, a hacking trick?
Did their commission system changed nowdays?
. That is very low to my mind.
Booking.com offers 25-35%.10-13% looked crazy
What about the integration of Booking.com with external websites?
Are there deep integration possibilities?
Have you tried it?
Kris
http://www.segida.com