Stay22 vs. TravelPayouts: Which Earns More?

Stay22 and Travelpayouts are the biggest affiliate marketing network for travel bloggers. They help connect travel bloggers with the biggest, and best converting, travel affiliates for accommodations and tours so you can make more money.

I’ve worked with both companies over the years, both as an affiliate and as a guest speaker/collaborator. I’m also an affiliate for both companies. To be clear: all opinions in this article are my own. I am not being swayed one way or another by past, present, or future relationships with either company.

I’ve made sure to write this article when I’m not under contract with either so you can be sure that I am being 100% honest and transparent. In fact, I’m probably gonna hurt my chances of working with either one of them ever again. Oops!

So which will make you more money?

On average, most travel bloggers will make more affiliate income immediately with Stay22. That’s because of their “Let Me Allez” script that adds pop ups and interstitial ads across your website to basically cookie every single visitor. It might make you more money, but it runs user experience. And I find their new “Nova” feature that adds affiliate links to text further degrades this.

Most bloggers talking about blogging will hype Stay22 because they pay a $500 referral fee if you send someone to Stay22 and they then get 100 confirmed bookings.

You will make less money with Travelpayouts out of the box. Because, even with their AI features, you have to actually have an affiliate strategy to see success.

I’ve made 5-20x more a month with Travelpayouts on my now-retired travel blog and on my now-retired niche destination site than I have with Stay22. And that’s with not working on either for over 2 years now.

And yes, I’m using both on both of these sites. Cause you can very easily run both programs at the same time. Don’t worry, I’ll show you how!

But if I had to choose just one, I’d choose Travelpayouts.

Comparison	Stay 22	Travelpayouts
My December 2025 Earnings	$37.93	$757.66
Affiliate Types	Hotels and tours	Hotels, tours, e-sims, rental cars, and more
Income Clarity	Only shares your commission $ amount	Shares the commission percentage, booking amount, and your commission $ amount
Analytic Reporting	Page Analytics Report shows where people buy. Transactions shows the affiliate program and Stay22 tool. Only shows “where” people buy if you added a campaign ID.	Content Analytics Report shows exactly where and what people buy. Sortable by affiliate program and Travelpayouts tool.
Key Features	Let Me Allez Script Nova Spark Link Generator Maps Roam	Link Generator Widgets White Label Drive (formerly Emerald, Link Switcher, & Booking Booster) WordPress Plugin Chrome Extension AI-Powered Content Analytics Report
# of Brands	9	50+
Best For	Beginner bloggers Bloggers prioritizing quick income Hotel and tour income Bloggers looking to use affiliate maps Western blogs	Intermediate to advanced bloggers Bloggers who prioritize user experience Bloggers looking to monetize beyond hotels and tours Global blogs Social media travel creators Email marketing travel creators
Support	Email or chat bubble connects you with a real human 9am-5pm EST, weekdays	Chat bubble connects you with an AI assistant for basic needs. It’ll automatically connect you to a human. They have a 26 min response time

What is Stay22?

Stay22 is an AI-powered travel affiliate network.

When I started blogging, it just had it’s basic map function (which I used even way back when in 2021!). But over the years it’s expanded into one of the leading affiliate networks in our industry.

And with their test of the “Retail” function in 2025 and some rumblings I’ve heard about some Youtube tests, I expect they’re coming for a few other industries soon, too.

Stay22 is basically a middleman for bloggers. Rather than us having a Booking.com, Viator, Get Your Guide, and Agoda affiliate account, we just need 1 Stay22 account.

That’s how all affiliate networks work.

But Stay22’s unique selling point (“USP”) is all in their “Roam” AI.

… which you’ve probably never heard of even if you are using Stay22.

I hadn’t until I was researching the exact names of all the features for this article (and man, they do not make it easy to tell what’s what!).

Roam is basically the AI that powers Stay22’s “Let Me Allez” script. It’s kinda a matchmaker between users and affiliate partners. So when a user clicks on any affiliate link, it tries to figure out which affiliate platform they’d like best (i.e. Booking.com or Expedia) and sends them to that platform.

If, like me, you aren’t sure about what does what, here’s a quick breakdown:

Feature	What it Does
Let Me Allez (or LMA)	Converts existing affiliate links to Stay22 links, including broken or expired links. It can also be used to refer to the “LMA script” which is used to install Stay22’s features on your site
Nova (formerly the POP function)	Analyzes user intent, triggers a pop up in a new tab or window for an affiliate if it thinks they’re likely to book, chooses the “best” affiliate program for the user
Spark	Adds affiliate links to missed affiliate opportunities in your text
Allez Links	Create affiliate links and QR codes to share anywhere
Roam	The AI powering all of the above features

What I Like About Stay22

Stay22 makes a lot of travel bloggers a lot of money. Not just according to their own blog and Instagram channel.

I see lots of people commenting in travel Facebook Groups about their experience, and most have good things to say about their income.

They make it easy to monetize, especially for busy travel bloggers who are trying to balance blogging, social media, press trips, an email list, and somehow actually going on trips.

The script does cookie your audience a lot. Which means that even if they don’t buy in that moment, you can often get credit for a sale a day or two in the future (depending on the affiliate).

That’s nice if your audience are people like me who tend to take a pause before they’re ready to book anything.

The “Let Me Allez” script is easy to set up, especially since they created the “LMA Script Builder”, so you can create it yourself. You just install it on your site once, and you can sit back while the money rolls in!

Since you don’t need approval from their affiliate partners, you can literally start earning from day 1 … if you have any users on your site.

I loveee their maps!

I kinda wish they’d stuck to this as their main focus, cause they haven’t done much to develop these. And I really think that they’d do better if they focused on some sort of paywalled app, like a subscription, where audiences can buy maps from travel bloggers.

Or where travel bloggers can build their own maps with all sorts of affiliates. Maybe even some kinda audio-tour integration with the help of a private podcast like Hello Audio. Idk, I’m just spitballing!

My Problems With Stay22

I did an in-depth review of Stay22 on my Youtube channel in 2024, and none of my major problems with the network have been resolved. You can watch the full review here:

And I do have a fair number of problems with the system (although you’ll see I do with Travelpayouts, too! I’m a picky bitch on all fronts, don’t worry 🤣).

My biggest issue is that they aren’t transparent about commissions or bookings.

Stay22 won’t tell us our affiliate commission. All we know is that we get over 30% of what they get.

You can’t even reverse engineer it, because their reporting only shows you the commission you earned and the provider it was booked from.

Here’s a pending booking I have with Expedia:

The “quantity” is 4, which I’m assuming is 4 nights (although it could be anything cause I don’t even know if this is a hotel or not).

I’m making $19.20 USD if this goes through properly. Expedia’s commission can range from 1% to 6%, and there are sooo many hotels. So how am I supposed to know which hotel got booked?

1st party data is the most powerful tool a marketer has. And they take that from us.

Which truly infuriates me!

Cause even if we’re getting a lower affiliate commission than we might get direct or with Travelpayouts, if they conversion is as much higher as they claim, bloggers will still be lining up to use Stay22.

I scaled my income to $30k months with my travel blog largely by studying user experience on my site and first-party data. Like where people booked on my site, what they bought, when they bought it, and trying to figure out why so I could make it happen again.

I feel a bit like both hands have been tied behind my back when I look at my analytics reports in Stay22.

I’ve never had the “big income jump” other bloggers claim.

I’m sure many of them have had the increase, to some extent.

I haven’t. Even before I retired my travel blogs.

Maybe that’s because I was already maxed out with other affiliate set ups? But I find that hard to believe.

I did a comparison with Booking.com’s direct affiliate program and I made far less with Stay22, so I eventually had them exclude my Booking.com links so I could keep making more.

Their marketing team needs some extra training.

I’m not talking about the ones I’ve met at conferences like TBEX. They are so lovely and so well versed in the product!

But the ones who you often get matched with online, especially to set up your LMA script (back when you had to do it that way or even now when ya need some stuff customized) and the ones ya try to ask basic questions to … oftentimes I feel like I’m talking to someone who has never seen the software before.

It’s why I think so many travel bloggers end up in groups or on socials asking questions. Cause they just don’t trust the support, and that sucks.

Their income reporting is in 3 different tabs for no reason. It’s supposed to be a like easy one stop shop for your income right? So let me see that easily!

Instead, you’ve got a summary page that has 2 very hard to read graphs that I don’t think pass accessibility (at least not with my screen reader or navigating by mouse).

Then you have to click to “Transactions” to see your actual income. But it shows you “overall revenues” at the top even though it’s filtered to “current month” by default below.

If you go to the “Analytics” page, you then get another confusing graph.

Lastly, we have the “Page Analytics” report that shows the estimated earnings per click per page of your site.

It feels like I have to jump through hoops just to find out where I’m making money!

The script loads slower than Travelpayouts’. But it doesn’t impact your site speed!

At least, not on all the sites I’ve checked unless there is already something else causing a speed issue or mucking up the code (like the Mediavine Grow plugin that I constantly see slowing things down).

As a user, I hate when sites run the Nova script.

The interstitial loads on mobile, surreptitious pop ups on desktop that don’t switch the tab, and the ones that do switch the tab make my life hell when I’m auditing multiple students’ sites in a day.

It makes me want to leave the site ASAP. And I won’t lie, I often do with sites that aren’t from my students.

Spark adds too many affiliate links for my liking, even though they say it only adds an “average of 2.7 links per article.”

The sites I’ve been auditing have had far more than that. And usually in random places that make no sense or actively undercut a curated affiliate post.

My December 2025 Income

This is from 3 maps and the Let Me Allez script running everything but Nova across my retired travel blog in December 2025:

And a lil shameless self promotion, Stay22 and I co-hosted a free workshop to help travel bloggers get more traffic with my trending topic formula. It’s their most watched guest video to date! Check it out here:

What is Travelpayouts?

Travelpayouts is another travel affiliate network that connects bloggers with over 50 affiliate programs. It’s kind of a one-stop-shop for travel affiliates from accommodations to tours to esims to insurance and more!

You aren’t automatically approved for affiliates when you sign up for Travelpayouts. You have to get approval from the brands directly, although some will auto approve anyone (those are usually the lower paying or newer brands).

They started out as a way for travel bloggers to have all of their affiliates in one place. Which was especially handy for beginners who were promoting 5+ affiliates but not making enough at each to get paid out each month.

They started diving into white label and API usage as their USP, both of which they still offer. But I don’t see that talked about nearly as much as their general affiliates. So I can’t really comment on them as I haven’t tried either for myself.

In the last year, they’ve started competing with Stay22 more and more for AI-powered affiliate marketing.

They launched their “Emerald” tool, which basically auto inserted pretty affiliate boxes throughout your site (usually 1 with 3 top hotels, and 1 with a hotel, a tour, and a rental car option for the location).

Then they added Link Switcher, which can convert any link from a direct affiliate automatically to a Travelpayouts link. I did that when I got kicked out of Booking.com’s direct affiliate program:

What I Like About Travelpayouts

My favourite thing about their entire platform is the Content Analytics Report, for exactly the reason I get so annoyed at Stay22’s: it empowers creators.

You get all the juicy data you were missing with Stay22’s full suite of reports.

And the Bookings report actually shows you the total booking value, and your commission (or pending commission here):

I loveee that the Content Analytics Report means that you can be lazy with subIDs.

You shouldn’t be! …but we’ve all done it once or twice.

Or 1,000 times if you had 200 posts before you knew what a subID was like I did 🙈.

Travelpayouts really is a one stop shop for travel affiliates. You can find an affiliate for everything here!

You don’t need all those affiliates, to be clear. But it is super helpful to have everything in one dashboard.

There are always bonuses, promotions, and affiliate commission increases. The team really want the best for us bloggers, so they negotiate great bonuses for us!

Booking.com had a 1% commission increase for a big chunk of 2025. Over Q4, Viator had a 2% commission increase.

And everyone is eligible! You just opt in by entering your email in a Google Form (I’m guessing cause they have some inactive accounts? I would love it to just be automatic tbh) and you’re in!

You have way more control of their AI tools than you do with Stay22.

If you want to opt out of Stay22 on a specific webpage, you have to email them to get it customized.

With Travelpayouts, you can exclude URLs, affiliates, and adjust them for each AI tool separately!

This is great for me, cause I’m picky. So I get to be an annoying perfectionist with all my posts and pages, and their support person doesn’t hate me!

Their user interface is much more user friendly.

I find it cleaner and easier to use than Stay22.

My Problems With Travelpayouts

Like Stay22, Travelpayouts’ AI features hurt user experience.

Not all the time. But sometimes.

Their Emerald call out boxes have a number of issues. Bloggers can’t customize the colours and the colours are optimized to “pop”, not to be accessible with your link colour.

On my old niche destination site, the boxes were always blue when my links were also blue.

I found the Emerald boxes advertising a hotel, a tour, and a car rental super generic. The AI clearly has the power to hunt down a top thing to feature for each one, cause the top 3 hotel box can do it. But instead it just shows kinda a generic blurb with the location name inserted like madlibs.

… and it doesn’t check that these things actually exist in the location.

For a general blog, you’ll be fine. But for a niche city site, it can be a problem.

Unfortunately, they’re following in Stay22’s shoes a bit too closely for my liking.

Their new Drive function is now able to auto-insert links into post text and is showing “targeted offers”. These seem pretty similar to Spark and Nova, although I haven’t had time to fully analyze them yet since they’re newer.

This one is more from the perspective of an affiliate for Travelpayouts themselves, but they need to stop changing the names of things!

It’s very hard to stay up to date when all of the names keep swapping about. Someone asked about “Drive” recently and I was like “wtf is that?” and had to go deep diving.

Travelpayouts has a lot of room to carve out a USP that targets content creators off-site.

They get accused of chasing Stay22’s on-site AI set ups sometimes. And I can kinda see why. The two are pretty similar at this point.

But neither one really optimizes email marketing or products super well yet.

At least with Travelpayouts, cause there’s more reporting available, you could track things better. But it’d still be a challenge since you’d need a subID.

I would love to see them expand into something like this with a way to make tracking links from emails easier for creators in 2026, or maybe something built off their content analytics report that could suggest emails based on a bloggers highest converting affiliates (win win for the bloggers and the affiliate platform, right?).

Note: I will be adding more to the TP section of this review, especially as I explore Drive more. But it’s late and I needed to publish this.

My December 2025 Travelpayouts

I made $757.66 from Travelpayouts in December 2025 while running the Drive script (formerly the Emerald and Link Switcher scripts) and with manual link insertions:

Which is Better

Stay22 and Travelpayouts are like fraternal twins: they’re pretty similar but if ya look closely you’ll see some differences.

And I’m gonna be the asshole parent who has a favourite kid.

I like Travelpayouts better.

I’m an analytics girl, so having the clarity in my data matters massively to me.

I will always prioritize user experience for my audience, and for the intentionality of my marketing strategy. The customization and the ability to primarily optimize my affiliate links my way are key.

And I like that I can get almost all my affiliates in one place.

I still use Stay22, too. But if you really only want to use one, then I’d go with Travelpayouts.

It’s got all the benefits of Stay22’s AI automations and more!

How to Use Both Without Breaking Your Site

Yes, you can use both on your website at the same time.

But they can interfere with each other a bit.

Travelpayouts loads fast, which means it’s going to load first. So if you don’t want it’s AI overpowering Stay22, you’ll need to exclude those features (just opt out of them individually).

On the other hand, Stay22 sometimes converts manual Travelpayouts links to Stay22 affiliate links.

When I first joined, you had to get them to manually opt them in to have them converted, but I’ve heard mixed reports over time. So to be safe, if you don’t want a certain link being converted with Stay22, I’d contact their team.

The scripts that “interfere” are mostly ones doing the same thing.

• Nova on Stay22 = Travelpayouts’ new “Targeted Offers”
• Spark on Stay22 = Travelpayouts’ new “Link Relevant Keywords”

Stay22 claims that Travelpayouts’ “Link Switcher” tool converts their links. It’s not supposed to and when I spoke with TP, they said it doesn’t.

But just in case, you may want to opt those out if you notice a dip in bookings with them after you add TP’s Drive code.

Here’s how I have them both set up:

1. Turn on “Drive” in Travelpayouts
2. Get the script
3. Go to your website and find the place to insert code in your header. I use Kadence Pro’s Header area for this. But you might need to add a free Header/Footer plugin (I like WP Code Lite)
4. Paste the script (or if you have speed issues, the footer can help ensure your content loads first)
5. Go to Stay22 and create an “LMA script” (I got a custom one made without Spark and to ensure it excludes Travelpayouts links)
6. Paste the script in your header or footer. If in your header, put it after Travelpayouts’ code (I find it’ll load after anyway)
7. Save and clear your cache

Then go to your site and check!

Look incognito. Look on mobile.

And then check your analytics after a week and after a month to ensure everything is functioning properly.

My Top Tips for Increasing Your Affiliate Conversions

And no, it’s not “sign up to more travel affiliate networks.”

In fact, my first tip is the opposite:

1. Only sign up to affiliates you actually use and recommend. I say no more than 5 to start.
2. Write dedicated review posts. They will always convert better than generic round ups.
3. Share cons! Negatives help people make purchases more than positives.
4. Share photos and videos, even if they’re kinda janky. People want to know you did the thing. Images help prove that.
5. Pair a review with a Youtube or Instagram video targeting the same keyword. It’ll help it rank and double the AI Search visibility

Most bloggers expect the high volume keywords to be the ones that convert best.

Nope!

It’s the high intent keywords that will make you money. Those are the ones that AI can’t replace our unique experience on.

And if you optimize them for AI Search, and optimize all your posts on that topic for it, you’ll easily double if not triple your income without needing to write 100 extra posts for another $100 a month from ads.

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