Why Travel Publishers Should Connect With Stay22

I work with a lot of different affiliate partners, both direct and through aggregators, but the one that has been paying off the most consistently over the past six months has been Stay22. I first started using them years ago when they came out with their hotel maps function, but then they moved into other monetization options that lessened our headaches and increased our earnings potential as content creators.

After hanging out with several of their employees at conferences on multiple continents, I connected with one of them, Alastair Cunningham, to get the inside scoop on what’s happening with the company. And how they can help us travel bloggers be more successful.

There are probably some travel bloggers out there who have never heard of Stay22 and aren’t quite sure what you do. Give us the history and where you are now.

Sure, whilst we’ve gained some solid traction in the blogging sphere, there will still be many who haven’t heard of us. In full transparency, despite our successes, I can’t say that I’m surprised as we didn’t even have a marketing team until October last year!

Way back in 2016, we were solely in the ticketing and event space, where our goal was to help eventgoers find accommodation quickly and easily, close to the event. With our customizable maps we helped enhance the UX of these platforms and drive them additional revenue too.

We had (and continue to) have huge success in this space, partnering with some of the world’s largest ticketing and event companies in the world. Companies such as Bandsintown, Eventim Group, Live Nation Italia, Ed Fringe Festival, Vivid Seats etc. Whilst we were diversified in our partner mix and geography we were not diversified by industry.

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When the pandemic hit, our revenues literally dropped to 5% overnight as the pandemic started to take hold. Pretty much every event in the world was canceled, and as such, we hit the bottom pretty fast. We needed to diversify sharpish, whilst still maintaining and supporting our current partners as best we could. We saw a great opportunity during these times to help bloggers, content creators, and publishers, and after a period of learning, we began to understand our value in this industry, and how we could help this wonderful community.

Fast forward to today and the large majority of company resources are now deployed to help this specific industry maximize the travel intent of their readers, with bespoke, industry-leading solutions. While we’ve come a long way since 2016, we have lots more to learn, lots more to do and we’re super excited about the future!

Give us some numbers: how many publishers are members of your platform and how much business are you doing on a monthly basis?

Today we’re helping over 2,000 partners save time and money by monetizing their travel content more effectively. We do this by helping our partners’ readers make better and faster travel bookings with our solutions, which in turn, drives a commission to our partners every time we do.

To give you some context we have 60 million monthly users of our technology, and 1 billion interactions, yearly, across all Stay22 solutions. Never did we expect that type of traction back in 2016!

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I know many of us saw a big spike in earnings when Booking.com moved off of CJ and left us with the chore of having to change hundreds or thousands of deep links. (Grrrrr…) You guys secured a warm place in our hearts by giving us a piece of code to put in the header that switched them all so they didn’t break—and captured other vendors in the process. How did that plan come about?

We’ve always stayed close to our partners with our ears to the ground to help support them more effectively. When Booking pulled away from CJ we saw a perfect opportunity to help build something to deal with this specific pain point. Some of our partners had 20K+ links, and manually changing them over from CJ to us (or anyone else for that matter) would take considerable time and effort. Where to even start?

Our script enables our partners to redirect all of their existing links automatically, and in just 5 minutes! No more 404s and back to full monetization in the time it takes to make a cup of tea.

Besides that ease of use, what are some advantages of working with Stay22 compared to an aggregator like CJ, Awin, or Impact?

Whilst I’m obviously biased, I believe the biggest differentiator with Stay22 is its people. Humans not bots! We’re a bunch of available, approachable travel geeks that are on hand every step of the way to ensure your success. Questions and queries are swiftly answered, as opposed to some of the other guys where you send an email and hope for a response that often never comes. We also attend many events a year, so if you want to pick our brains over a glass of something, or over a meal, we’re always available (and willing) to chat!

Whilst the human aspect is big, there are lots of other benefits to Stay22, such as:

* Payout terms – Checkout + 7 days, as opposed to +60/90 days after checkout with others.
* Reporting in the hub is pretty great, but if our partners have additional interest or need, we’re more than happy to pull extra reports for them, and do a deep dive!
* Totally unique solutions like our AI Powered “POP” to drive extra bookings and revenue without impacting any current success.
* Multiple providers such as Booking, Expedia, VRBO, Trivago, Hotels.com etc, all in one space. No pre-existing relationships or affiliations are required, and all of these providers can be accessed with one simple registration with Stay22. This allows our partners to instantly monetize millions of listings from the best Online Travel Agencies and suppliers.
* There’s also no barrier to entry with us—we want to help everyone at every stage of their journey. Big or small, we’d love to hear from you!

What new developments are on the way that you’re working on?

Wow, where to start?

We’ve always strived to offer the best solutions for our partners, and as such, we prioritize reinvesting heavily into R&D, thus ensuring we always stay ahead of the game and continue to drive the most amount of revenue for our partners, whilst ensuring that their readers have a great experience. AI is obviously super hot right now and we’re reinvesting heavily into this space. We’ve got some awesome things in the works, stay tuned!

Affilimate – Our partners spoke, and we listened. We’re excited to bring this new cross-platform integration towards the end of Q3 / beginning of Q4. It will help digital publishers collect affiliate commissions and content analytics in one place so you can optimize conversion and grow your revenue. There’s been so much interest in this, I genuinely can’t wait to deliver this for our partners.

We are pushing into new areas of monetization, such as tours and activities, so expect updates on this very soon.

A new website is on the way, with loads more exciting things to come. We’re only getting started.

What’s Stay22’s stance on remote work and how is the team organized?

Whilst our HQ is based in Montreal, Canada, Stay22 has always been pro-remote, and this enables us to consider a wider pool of applicants for new roles within Stay22, to ensure we attract the best talent. We’ve had some of our remote team based in Nigeria, Brazil, Dubai, Florida, Thailand, UK + Western Europe, Ukraine, and more! It’s such a wonderful, diverse culture at Stay22 and I absolutely love it.

On top of that, we get together twice a year for company retreats (full team), and regular team-wide meetings and catch-ups. Every member of the team is available to chat with via internal communication meaning distance isn’t a problem.

You and I have had some good times together at TBEX and we bloggers who attend are happy to meet your team members there. Your latest newsletter said you onboarded 15 bloggers on site at the Wisconsin one. What else do you get out of attending that conference?

Indeed we have Tim! You’ve always been one of our early supporters, and we’ve worked together for many years now. I love catching up with you and [your wife] Donna at events, and hearing all about your travels, what you’re working on, etc . It’s one of the best perks of my job to be able to do that with you guys, and the wider community.

In-person events, in my humble opinion, offer so much value. Trust and relationships are so important in this space and our team always looks forward to wonderful events such as TBEX, IMM, WITS, and others. The ability to hang out together in a relaxed environment, away from the day-to-day is so special. We’ve made some solid relationships at these events, whether it’s at our booth, a pre-TBEX tour, around the bar, or sharing a meal together in a different location than what we call home. We’re lucky to be able to call a large proportion of our partners our friends as well which makes these events even more special.

The talks at these events are always so informative, engaging, enlightening, and hugely valuable too and we can’t thank the TBEX guys enough for being so welcoming over the years. *Hat tip to Rick, Patti, Donna and the rest of the TBEX crew* thank you!

This year in Eau Claire we brought along one of our lovely Partner Success Associates, Margot. Not only is Margot a hugely valuable and experienced member of our team she had the ability to help partners “go live” with Stay22 there and then, saving our partners time and money. Many partners even trusted us with their laptops, so we could get them up and running, whilst they jumped to another talk. Now that’s trust. Needless to say, we’ll definitely be doing that again in the future!

These events are also a great opportunity to listen to our partners and hear their feedback (good, bad or ugly). This way we can continue to offer the best solutions for our wonderful partners and maximize the travel intent of their readers.

Interested in earning money on your blog through Stay22? Apply here!

Alastair Cunningham is Senior Business Development Manager at Stay 22, where his role is to help travelers find the perfect place to stay via event planners and travel publishers. He is based in England (we changed all his UK spellings) and has been with the company since 2020. See his full bio here. If you wish to contact Alastair directly, you can reach him at al (at) stay22 (dot) com