If you're a travel blogger looking for ways to monetize your content, you've probably explored the usual suspects. Booking.com, GetYourGuide, Amazon Associates.
But one platform that is now delivering consistently strong, passive income for us is the Stay22 affiliate programme. In this in-depth guide, I’m sharing exactly how we've earned over $20,000 USD through Stay22 in the last 2 years.
Without using their maps; and more importantly, why I genuinely enjoy using it.
But first, a little backstory.
My partner and I started Dream Big, Travel Far back in 2016 during a backpacking trip. We had no experience, no audience, no income. Just two people who loved to travel and wanted to document our adventures.
By the end of 2018, the blog had grown enough to support us full-time (well, ignoring the chaos of 2020…). We joined Mediavine that year, and honestly, that was our first big breakthrough. Display ads became our first consistent, passive income stream.
No chasing links, no managing brands, just writing good content and letting Mediavine handle the rest. We did do affiliate marketing as well, and knew that this had the means to make significantly more than display ads.
We now have nearly three dozen active affiliate programmes. That means constant monitoring, testing, inserting links, updating old content, and tracking which ones are still working.
It’s manual, it's time-consuming, and to be brutally honest; we’ve never had the time or resources to do proper A/B testing across different providers.
That’s why Stay22 has come to stand out to us. In this new climate where you simply do not know how well content will do in terms of gaining traffic, Stay22 can save you a hUge amount of time.
Just like Mediavine, it automatically converts visits into income. And for articles that take hours to write but never perform, you at least save time in one department.
The Stay22 affiliate programme partners with top OTAs like Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, and now even Agoda. But their real value is in how they streamline affiliate linking.
They offer a bunch of monetization tools (discussed below). But the main 2 we find are:
We don’t use their interactive maps at all. 100% of our earnings have come from the LMA popup and auto-switching tools.
And they’re constantly trialling new features. At the time of writing, they’ve just launched auto-conversion of Agoda links, and we’re part of the trial switching over our Booking.com direct affiliate links. So far? Results have been good. Not necessarily higher earnings, but no drop either; and with zero extra work, that’s a huge win.
They also mark up all sales by post, which means you get post-specific tracking without needing to manually tag every link. Again, this saves a ton of time. Especially now, as we’re seeing the affiliate landscape shift again.
At the time of writing, Booking.com is in the process of randomly closing down their direct affiliate partnerships. Bloggers are getting shut down and blocked from their accounts with zero notice.
We are currently in the middle of trialling Stay22’s direct auto links switching with Booking.com to see how it performs. Given what’s going on with everyone else around us we will probably now just stick with this. Why risk being kicked out from the direct programme and potentially losing revenue.
That’s another reason Stay22 brings so much peace of mind. It acts like a buffer between us and the chaos.
As of writing this, we've earned $20,886.42 USD through the Stay22 affiliate programme, with over 3,240 bookings across 2 years.
So far in June 2025 (from 1st-10th) we have seen:
What’s wild is that our overall traffic has been declining in recent months. Just like every other blogger this is thanks to Google’s AI-driven updates. But in this time, our earnings from Stay22 have actually gone up. That’s because their platform does a better job of converting the traffic we do have.
I was actually one of the first bloggers to jump on a call with Stay22 back in their “early days” of working with bloggers. Originally, they were focused on embedded hotel maps; working with airlines and event sites to upsell accommodation.
But when Airbnb shut down its affiliate programme in 2021, Stay22 stepped in with access to Airbnb, VRBO, and others. They pivoted quickly and opened their doors to bloggers. Gaining hundreds of applicants within days.
We never properly began working with them then. A lot of bloggers were using it as a way to still gain money from their “best Airbnbs in …” style guides; but it seemed inevitable that Airbnb would soon revoke Stay22’s access to the affiliate programme as well.
Which they did.
Since 2021, I’ve had several calls with the team, and every time I’ve been impressed. They’re proactive, always adapting, and genuinely interested in supporting publishers. They don’t just sit on their hands. They develop tools, test integrations, and take real feedback.
We started working with them about 2 years ago by integrating their LMA popup to see if it could drive easy, no work-needed money. And it did! Soon delivering a few hundred and then about a thousand dollars a month, with no extra work needed at our end.
When we trialled the Booking.com switch-over, they walked us through it. No sales pitch, just real help. Same thing when they started pushing Agoda testing. Their team actually listened to our feedback and were open about the results.
Here’s a breakdown of the tools we’ve tested (and continue to use)via the Stay22 affiliate programme.
This is the core of everything we do with Stay22. The LMA script runs quietly in the background and automatically picks up any hotel-related links like Booking.com, Expedia, Agoda, and more. It then replaces them with affiliate-tagged versions that Stay22 tracks on your behalf.
The best part? You don’t have to manually change a thing. Just install it (we used Google Tag Manager), and it’s done. If you want, you can enable the optional popup that displays a helpful price comparison when a user clicks one of those links. We turned this on and started earning within days.
It’s genuinely set-and-forget. And even better, each sale is tagged with the blog post it came from, so you can track performance without doing any custom tagging.
Nova is a newer feature we tested that acts like a super subtle booking popup. But here’s the difference: it only appears for users that Stay22’s system thinks are ready to book. They call these people with “high intent.”
It doesn’t show up for everyone, and it’s built to avoid disrupting your reader. We’ve seen no complaints about UX, and it’s generated bookings from users who may not have clicked any links at all. Quietly effective.
Spark is the behind-the-scenes tool that scans your content and identifies where you could be adding affiliate links for places you’ve maybe missed. It then adds a couple of those links for you automatically.
We’ve tested this as well, and honestly, it’s a great time-saver. If you’ve got hundreds of older posts, Spark does the job of quietly turning more of them into money-makers, without you needing to revisit each one manually.
Bottom line … If you want to solely focus on punching out content, then go ahead and disintegrate your site with stay22.
They will automagically add in affiliate links and convert visitors into customers through their script. It is an absolutely easy and stress free way to make an extra few hundred (or even thousand) dollars a month for zero extra work.
Then just keep in touch with them and stay tuned for ongoing product releases and trials. You can even use them to do your GYG links, though we still use the direct programme as well as Viator’s direct programme.
No programme is perfect and Stay22 is by no means the only way I recommend you monetize your content.
There are a lot of affiliate programmes they don't have access to pushing, Viator for one. And just relying on them and an ad partner can lead to you missing out on earning opportunities.
Instead, I would say they are a great add-on. Maybe that will change over time. Who knows.
There are plenty of other tools I recommend, such as Travelpayouts (read our review here). Which also offers some automatic tools for monetizing content without you having to do anything.
Blogging has changed. Since 2022–2023 we were riding high, but Google’s AI modelling in 2024 hit like a sledgehammer. Like many bloggers, we’ve watched traffic drop and income shrink.
But Stay22? It’s been one of the few constants still growing. Even as sessions fall, earnings rise. It’s bizarre, but it’s proof that smart monetization beats brute traffic any day.
For us, Stay22 started as a simple LMA script we didn’t think much about. Now? It’s a major revenue stream. And it’s growing, not because we’re doing more — but because they’re doing more.
If you’re overwhelmed with managing affiliate links, if you’re frustrated with affiliate programmes suddenly disappearing, or if you just want to spend more time writing and less time tweaking, then Stay22 is hands-down one of the smartest tools you can install on your blog.
Just remember to use our affiliate link when signing up, it really does help us (and you) out.
Over to you …
Do you have any questions I didn’t address?
Or have tried the Stay22 programme yourself?
Drop me a comment below, I would love to hear from you.
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