HotelsCombined affiliate Review
December 23rd, 2009
They are winners in some markets. I think they should develop their affiliate system a little bit.
They had suspended my account and denied the payment of commission and they reopened it later and payed for me.
A HotelsCombined affiliate e-mail:
“We suspended your account because your traffic quality was very poor. It took a long time to identify this, because your traffic volumes were so low too. This means that you have very little traffic, and what you do have is very poor quality.
Note that we compare 30+ different providers, so booking.com and HRS form only a very tiny part of our hotel inventory.
If you really want to repair your relationship with us, I strongly suggest you focus on sending good quality traffic to your remaining Affiliate Links. This is the only way to get your Affiliate account out of its suspended state, by generating some real revenue for us.
Regards,
Hotels Combined Affiliate Team
Hotels Combined Pty Ltd
3/173-179 Broadway,
Ultimo, Sydney, NSW, 2007, Australia
—
I knew some SEO experts, they were very tricky and they could send huge amount of traffic to HotelsCombined in 2009. I do not use these kind of tricks. I have very nice travel blogs with good conversions rates. I prefer booking.com affiliate system (~1%).
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Yes. Cookies is only a sweet bait.
http://www.hotelscombined.com/AboutUs/Privacy.aspx
Booking.com has much more better conversion rates in the European market. They offer 1-2% estimated conversions for relevant traffic.
Cookies should be used more often. Respectability is more important than profit many times.
Thanks for taking time to discuss it, I feel it and love learning more on this topic…
Crises
Cookies can not work!
Most of the partners of HotelsCombined do not use it. So it is only a tricky marketing to increase their traffic.
I think we should report it to Search Engines too. They did not pay tidily recently.
Their cookies could work sometimes very well. It can not become 100% precise of course. Some bigger affiliates could measure it.
Do you know the conversion rates? Is 0,5-1,5% possible with them?
You made some good points there. I did a search on the topic and found most people will agree with your blog.
What is captcha code?, pls provide me captcha code codes or plugin, Thanks in advance.
It’s probably best to hear straight from the horse’s mouth on this issue.
Direct hotel providers who use a CPA commission model can only be transparent because they have total control of the booking. They also only pay you for bookings, and tend to pay you only after the end-user actually stays at the hotel, which can be several months in the future.
We don’t actually control the final booking. Also, each of our providers uses a different commission structure and reporting system, which makes total transparency overly complicated and probably confusing to our Affiliates. This is why we pay per-Lead instead of per-booking, and why we offer a Detailed Traffic Audit whenever you want more detailed information about your traffic statistics.
Our commissions are smaller ($0.50 – $1.00), but conversions are more often (50% – 100%) and we process payments monthly on the balance as at the start of the month. This means your revenue stream is much more stable and reliable in the long term.
Regarding cookies, just about all Affiliate Programs use them. They are the only way to track repeat visits, and the only way to ensure that users can’t tamper with the URL to avoid generating commissions on your account. There are of course ways to render cookies useless, but this is rare, and there is no way to protect against it anyway.
If anyone has any questions about the HotelsCombined.com Affiliate Program, please direct them straight to our support team at affiliate@HotelsCombined.com
Regards,
HotelsCombined Affiliate Team.
I had some tests. These were ok.