Online Business Idea: Help Travelers to Look for the Right Hotel

hotel deals search site
Hotel search
This is a great travel business opportunity for you and me: Helping travelers to find the right hotels that deliver them the most value for their money.

If you do business travel a lot, you need to find the right business hotels to stay. The keyword here is ‘right.’ By ‘right’ I mean the hotel I stay in must deliver the most value for money – entrepreneurs should spend every penny carefully while getting the most of it.

Not only business travel, in any other travel purposes – especially for leisure – travelers need to find the right hotel to stay in; not necessarily a budget hotel, but at least a hotel that delivers luxury on a shoestring budget.

This is a lucrative niche in which we can set up an online business; we can help others to discover the right hotel for them by aggregating hotel information from plenty of travel sites and deliver a simple, summarised result for easy decision-making.

Let’s start a hotel search site!

Now the issue here is to find the right partner to affiliate with.

Not any kind of affiliation will do; I’m thinking about joining an affiliate program that allows us to ‘white label’ or at least offers us a way to ‘host’ the hotel search form, instead of referring our site visitors to other site’s homepage; the latter is a waste of resource as it will yield poor conversion rate, meaning less money for your online business.

Of some travel sites offering affiliate marketing opportunities, I have found one that stands out – Hotels Combined.

Hotels Combined Pty Ltd, headquartered in Sydney, Australia, offers travelers a way to search for hotel deals. The search works like this:

  1. Enter your search info – the city you wish to stay, the check-in and check-out date and the number of guests and rooms. You can also search by hotel name or by country.
  2. The system will search through travel sites and will be present you a list of hotels that can be sorted in many ways – by popularity, by price, and more. You can also read reviews on the listed hotels to help you decide.
  3. You can then be directed to the travel site that has the best deal for the hotel you want.

The hotel search result pages present a strong call-to-action message – this is good if you are Hotels Combined’s affiliate!

What’s inside the Hotels Combined Affiliate Program?

I’ve joined Hotels Combined Affiliate Program, and to say the least, joining couldn’t be easier. All you need to do is to fill in your information and your application will be instantly approved – no more days or weeks of pending application approval.

Inside, you can generate links, access banners and get hotel search boxes, including a WordPress plugin. If you are tech-savvy, you can access data feeds and apply for APIs.

The best thing being a Hotels Combined affiliate is that you can ‘white label’ or private brand the hotel search, in such a way that the content can be blended seamlessly with your website – this will significantly increase your conversion rates.

Now, about the commission system: On average, you will be paid US$0.50 – US$1.00 for each hotel supplier leads and US$0.14 for each Google ad click (yes, you can choose to display Google Ads on your site.)

What’s unique with Hotels Combined affiliate program is that you can earn commission even BEFORE the traveler completes any further action on the hotel supplier’s website. Other hotel affiliate programs require the travelers to actually stay at the hotel before you can get paid any commissions.

Are you ready to start a hotel online business idea?

I am ready and I expect you will do, too. I’ve joined travel-related programs before and I honestly think Hotels Combined Affiliate Program has got more to offer. You should give it at try – it’s free, anyway.

Ivan Widjaya
Business hotels

Update: I practice what I preach – As I mentioned above, I finally launched a hotel comparison site, with hotel search powered by Hotels Combined: Hotel Deal Finder. Please visit us – Just in case you are planning to travel…