Estimated reading time: 15 mins
Right, full disclosure before we start. Every Booking.com link on The Travel Tinker runs through Stay22, and Booking.com happens to be my single best-earning affiliate partner. So this Stay22 review isn’t me kicking the tyres on something new. It’s me explaining the plumbing behind a chunk of my actual income, written about ten minutes after checking the dashboard (three bookings overnight, one of them a two-week stay in Portugal, lovely stuff).
If you write about travel and your accommodation links aren’t earning what they should, stick around. I’ll cover what Stay22 actually is, how the money works, what the tools do, and the few things I’d grumble about over a pint. Short version: I rate it highly enough to trust it with my hotel income. Long version below, with the receipts.
This article may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase through these links, we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. This helps fund the site and keeps our guides free. See our full affiliate disclosure for details.
Try it yourself: Stay22 is free to join with no traffic minimums. Sign up for your free Stay22 account here and have a look around the dashboard while you read. Everything below will make far more sense with it open.
Quick Facts: Stay22 at a Glance
What it is: A travel affiliate platform built around one clever script that monetises your accommodation and travel links automatically
Big names: Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo, Kayak, TripAdvisor, GetYourGuide and Agoda all sit behind it
Cost to join: Free. No sign-up fee, no subscription, no traffic minimums, no risk
Human support: Every partner gets a dedicated Partner Success Associate. A real person with a name, not a ticket queue
Tracking: Real-time dashboard, so you see bookings as they happen rather than a day later
Track record: Trusted by over 5,000 creators and publishers, processing more than $1 billion (around £800 million / €920 million) in travel transactions a year
Tinker's Tip: When you join, tell your Partner Success Associate which affiliate links you already use. Stay22's script can convert existing brand links into tracked ones automatically, so your old posts start earning without you editing a single one. Mention it on day one, not month three.
A Complete Stay22 Review for Travel Bloggers
Some context, so you know exactly where this is coming from. The Travel Tinker is a travel blog covering destination guides, transport guides and planning resources for a global audience. Accommodation gets mentioned in nearly every post I publish, because people reading about a destination are usually also wondering where to sleep in it. Obvious, really. And yet for ages I treated hotel links as an afterthought.
Stay22 changed how I think about that. Instead of me manually building the perfect affiliate link for every hotel mention, their script sits quietly on my site and handles it. Links get tracked, broken hotel links get caught, and readers get pointed at whichever booking platform is most likely to convert for them. My job shrank down to just writing about places, which is the bit I actually enjoy.
And the results back it up. Booking.com through Stay22 is my best-performing affiliate partnership on this entire site. Not by a whisker either. When someone reads my Lisbon guide and books four nights near Alfama, that’s Stay22 doing its thing in the background while I’m off writing the next post (or, more honestly, drinking coffee and calling it research).
Perfect? Not quite, and the cons section further down is genuinely honest. But for accommodation income specifically, nothing else I’ve tried comes close.
Good to know: Stay22's incentives line up with yours. They earn a share only when your links generate bookings, so every tool they build exists to make you more money, not to charge you fees. That alignment shows in how the whole platform behaves.
What Is the Stay22 Partner Program?
In plain English: Stay22 is a Canadian travel tech company that helps bloggers, creators and publishers earn commission from the travel intent already sitting in their content. You write about a city, your readers book a stay there, you get paid a slice. The reader pays nothing extra and books on the same big-name platforms they’d have used anyway.
The clever bit is how it’s delivered. Rather than making you apply to Booking.com, Expedia and half a dozen others separately, Stay22 gives you one account, one script, and access to all its partner platforms through a single relationship. One login. One payout. One dashboard showing everything in real time.
It’s also refreshingly welcoming to small sites. There’s no traffic gate to clear, so you can join while your blog is still finding its feet. I know bloggers who signed up with a few thousand sessions a month and grew into it. Try getting that kind of open door from some direct programmes.
Here’s who you’re actually promoting when you use it:
← Swipe to scroll on mobile
| Partner platform | Best for | My take |
|---|---|---|
| Booking.com | Hotels, apartments, almost everything | My best earner on the whole site. Readers trust it, so it converts |
| Expedia | Packages, flights + hotel bundles | Strong for readers in North America especially |
| Hotels.com | Hotel deals and rewards bookers | Quietly reliable. Loyal repeat bookers |
| Vrbo | Holiday homes and family stays | Bigger baskets, so single bookings can pay well |
| Kayak & TripAdvisor | Comparison-minded readers | Handy for catching bookers who like to shop around |
| GetYourGuide & Agoda | Tours, plus stays in Asia | Rounds things out nicely beyond pure hotel content |
Fact: Stay22 processes over $1 billion (around £800 million / €920 million) in travel transactions every year across more than 5,000 creators and publishers, from solo bloggers to major ticketing platforms. That's not a scrappy startup experiment. That's serious infrastructure.
How Do You Use Stay22 to Make Money?
Here’s the entire workflow, and notice how little of it involves you doing anything fiddly:
- Sign up for free. No traffic minimums, no location restrictions, and you get paid wherever you’re based. Takes minutes.
- Install one script. Copy, paste, done. If you can install a WordPress plugin, you can do this. Your Partner Success Associate checks it’s working properly.
- Keep writing. The script converts your accommodation links into tracked affiliate links automatically, existing posts included. New content gets picked up as you publish.
- Add extras where they fit. Deep links to specific hotels, interactive maps under destination guides, that sort of thing. Optional, but they lift earnings noticeably.
- Get paid. Bookings land in your real-time dashboard, and you request your payout once your balance clears the monthly minimum. Money arrives in your local currency.
The bit that surprised me most: how well it works on content I’d already written. Years of destination guides with plain hotel mentions suddenly became earning assets overnight. No editing marathons. No going post by post through the archive on a rainy Sunday. The script did the lot, which frankly felt like cheating.
If you’re starting from zero, create your free Stay22 account, get the script installed the same day, then write your next post exactly as you normally would. Mention where you stayed. Link to it naturally. That’s it, that’s the strategy. My travel planning resources page shows what naturally placed booking links look like in the wild if you want a living example.
Quick win: Link to specific hotels, not homepages. "We stayed at this gorgeous riad in the medina" with a direct link converts several times better than a generic "find hotels in Marrakech" link. Specific recommendations read as genuine because they are.
The Tools That Set Stay22 Apart
This is where Stay22 earns its keep. The whole toolkit runs off their AI engine (they call it Roam), and each piece solves a real blogger problem rather than existing for a press release:
The Smart Script (Let Me Allez). The heart of everything. One snippet of code that finds the travel links in your content and turns them into tracked, optimised affiliate links automatically. It also future-proofs you: publish a new post, and monetisation is just already there. For anyone with a back catalogue, this is the single biggest lever on the platform.
Nova. Reads booking intent and serves the right travel offer to the right reader at the right moment. Someone deep in your “where to stay in Rome” guide gets treated differently to someone skimming a packing list, which is exactly how it should work.
Spark. Scans your content and finds the affiliate opportunities you missed. Every blog has them. Mine had embarrassingly many, it turns out. Spark flags them and fills the gaps so unmonetised mentions stop leaking income.
Interactive Maps. Embeddable maps showing accommodation around a location or event. Readers browse stays without leaving your post, and any booking made through the map is credited to you. They look properly good under destination guides too.
Smart Links (Allez). Upgraded deep links built for conversion. Handy for newsletters, social bios and anywhere the script can’t reach.
Must do: Get the Smart Script installed in week one, then ask your Partner Success Associate to review your top ten posts for missed opportunities. Ten minutes of their time regularly finds money you didn't know you were leaving on the table.
Honest Pros & Cons of Using Stay22
Every affiliate review on the internet promises brutal honesty, then delivers a brochure. I’d rather you sign up knowing exactly what you’re getting, because a partner who joins with accurate expectations sticks around and actually earns. So here’s the real picture, warts included. Spoiler: the warts are small, but they exist.
Reality check: Stay22 multiplies what your content already does. It can't rescue a blog nobody reads. Get traffic to posts where people are deciding where to stay, and the platform turns that intent into income. No traffic, no magic. Same as everywhere.
Stay22 Pros
The script does the heavy lifting. This is the whole pitch and it delivers. Old posts monetised, new posts covered automatically, broken hotel links caught before they cost you. The hours saved per month are real hours.
Booking.com access done properly. Worth its own line. Booking.com converts brilliantly for travel content, and Stay22 gives you a well-optimised route into it. It’s my best-performing partnership site-wide, and I’m clearly not alone: Stay22’s own case studies include a big Irish travel site reporting a 50% jump in bookings and revenue, and another creator reporting a 14x revenue uplift after switching.
An actual human in your corner. Your Partner Success Associate knows your site, answers quickly, and proactively suggests improvements. In an industry where “support” usually means a chatbot with amnesia, this is genuinely rare.
Real-time reporting. Bookings appear in the dashboard as they happen. Petty? Maybe. But watching a booking land while you’re eating breakfast never stops being pleasing.
Zero barrier to entry. Free, no traffic minimums, open worldwide, paid in your local currency. If you’re early in your blogging journey, my start here page shows the kind of site structure all of this plugs into.
You keep your independence. No exclusivity. Run Stay22 alongside other networks and direct programmes as you like. I do exactly that, and nobody minds.
Money saver: Stay22 costs nothing to run, takes no fee from you directly, and catches broken or unmonetised hotel links that were quietly earning you nothing. For most travel blogs it's not an expense at all. It's recovered income.
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Browse the shopStay22 Cons
Now the grumbles. Honest ones, though you’ll notice none of them have made me leave.
It’s stays-first, not everything-first. Stay22 is brilliant for accommodation and increasingly good for tours, but it isn’t built to cover flights, travel insurance, eSIMs and car hire all in one place. I run it alongside Travelpayouts for exactly that reason, and the pairing works a treat. More on that combo below.
The payout minimum varies by country. Payouts run monthly on request once you clear your minimum, but that minimum depends on where you’re based and can be higher than some networks. Then allow up to 30 days for the money to land, though most partners report it arriving quicker. Fine once you’re rolling, slightly patience-testing in month one.
Handing over control takes a mindset shift. Letting a script manage your links feels odd at first if you’re a control freak about your own HTML (guilty). You can configure what it touches, and the dashboard shows you everything it does, but that first week of trust is a leap for some people.
Commission per booking varies. Your cut depends on the platform booked, the property, and the basket size, so per-booking earnings bounce around more than a flat-rate programme. The averages work out well, but spreadsheet purists will itch at the variability.
Watch out: Like all affiliate tracking, bookings completed inside a brand's mobile app rather than the browser usually won't credit to you. It's an industry-wide limitation, not a Stay22 one, but factor it in if your audience is heavily mobile.
How Much Can Travel Bloggers Earn with Stay22?
The annoying-but-true answer: it depends on your traffic and how booking-focused your content is. The useful answer: here are real, publicly shared numbers so you can calibrate properly.
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| Reported result | Who | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| 50% increase in bookings and revenue | A major Ireland travel site (Stay22 case study) | Large established site, so 50% is a big absolute number |
| 14x uplift in affiliate revenue | An established travel blogger (Stay22 case study) | The headline-grabber, from switching a whole site over |
| From near zero to $1,600+ (around £1,280 / €1,470) a month within a year | A smaller solo travel blogger, publicly shared | Started with only a few thousand sessions a month |
| Roughly $8 to $12 (around £6.50 to £9.50 / €7.50 to €11) per hotel booking | Commonly reported partner average | Varies with platform, property and stay length |
What I'd add from my own dashboard: accommodation is the steadiest affiliate income a travel blog can build, because nearly every reader planning a trip needs somewhere to sleep. Tours are impulse buys. Flights are price-hunted to death. But a hotel booking through a trusted recommendation? That happens every single day, quietly, at scale. It's the compounding asset of travel blogging.
Longer stays and pricier properties pay more, since your commission tracks the booking value. One reader booking a week in a Vrbo villa can out-earn ten hostel dorm bookings. Which is why "where to stay" content aimed at couples and families tends to punch above its traffic.
Getting paid works like this:
← Swipe to scroll on mobile
| Payment detail | How it works |
|---|---|
| Frequency | Request a payout once a month after clearing your minimum balance |
| Minimum threshold | Varies by country and payment method, so check yours in the dashboard |
| Currency | Paid to your bank in your local currency, wherever you're based |
| Timing | Up to 30 days after your request, usually sooner in practice |
One practical note: because bookings confirm after guests actually stay, patience matters in your first months. Plant the links now, and the payouts catch up with a satisfying lag. Once you're a few months in, your Stay22 dashboard becomes a rather pleasant place to check with your morning coffee.
Timing tip: Accommodation bookings confirm after check-out, so summer stays booked in spring pay you in autumn. Publish "where to stay" content ahead of peak booking season and treat the revenue as delayed gratification. It arrives, just fashionably late.
Stay22 vs Travelpayouts: Do You Need Both?
The question I get asked whenever affiliate chat comes up with other bloggers. And my honest answer is: they're not really competitors, they're teammates. I run both, on this very site, and each does a different job.
← Swipe to scroll on mobile
| Factor | Stay22 | Travelpayouts |
|---|---|---|
| Core strength | Accommodation, automated by one script | Breadth: 100+ brands across every travel niche |
| Best at | Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo stays | Tours, eSIMs, car hire, insurance, flights |
| Effort level | Lowest possible. Install script, carry on writing | Low, but you place most links yourself |
| Support style | Dedicated named human per partner | 24/7 support team, fast replies |
| Ideal user | Anyone with accommodation mentions in their content | Anyone monetising the full trip beyond the stay |
My setup, in case it helps: Stay22 handles my stays (with Booking.com leading the pack by a mile), and Travelpayouts covers tours, eSIMs, transfers and the rest of the trip. I wrote a full Travelpayouts review covering that side of things, and the two reviews together basically map my entire affiliate stack. Run both and you've covered a traveller's whole journey, from the flight-adjacent bits right down to the bed.
Check this first: If you're already running other affiliate links, tell your Stay22 Partner Success Associate before the script goes live so it's configured around your existing setup. Two minutes of housekeeping avoids any link-handling surprises later.
Earn Even More with the Stay22 Referral Program
Before the verdict, one more earning stream worth knowing about if you’re active in creator circles. Stay22 runs a referral programme that pays you real cash for pointing other creators their way, and it splits into two tracks depending on the kind of content your referral makes. Full details sit on the official Stay22 referral programme FAQ, but here’s the quick version.
For travel creators: you earn $500 (around £400 / €460) cash for every creator you refer who reaches 100 confirmed travel bookings on Stay22. Your referral also picks up a $100 (around £80 / €92) bonus once they hit that same milestone, so it’s a proper win-win rather than you skimming off someone else’s start.
For food and lifestyle creators: there’s a separate Retail track. You earn a $50 (around £40 / €46) gift card for every qualified food or lifestyle creator you refer once they go live with Stay22 Retail. Handy if your network includes creators outside pure travel, since Stay22’s retail side partners with brands like Walmart, Nike and Sephora rather than OTAs.
The travel bonus takes a bit of patience (100 confirmed bookings isn’t nothing), but it’s genuine cash rather than store credit, and there’s no cap on how many creators you can refer. If you know bloggers or content creators who’d benefit from what Stay22 does, sharing your link costs you nothing and helps them skip the “why isn’t my accommodation content earning” phase entirely.
Get started: Join Stay22 first, then refer second. Create your free Stay22 account here, get your own accommodation links earning, then grab your referral link from the Hub and share it with travel creators you rate.
Quick win: Know a food or lifestyle creator rather than a pure travel one? Point them at the Stay22 Retail referral link instead. Different milestone, different reward, same idea: help a fellow creator monetise content they're already making.
My Final Thoughts: Is Stay22 the Best Travel Affiliate Network?
For accommodation income, yes, and it’s not particularly close. The script-first approach removes the exact kind of tedious link admin that makes bloggers give up on monetisation, the partner platforms are the ones readers already trust, and there’s a real human whose actual job is helping your site earn more. That combination is rarer than it should be.
My cons are real but livable: it’s stays-focused rather than everything-focused, the payout minimum tests your patience early on, and per-booking commissions wobble around an average rather than sitting flat. None of that has ever tempted me to switch my Booking.com links elsewhere. Not once. When your best-earning partnership is also your lowest-effort one, you don’t fix what isn’t broken.
If your travel content mentions places to stay (and let’s be honest, it does), Stay22 is the closest thing to passive income this industry offers. My only complaint about joining is the same one I had with Travelpayouts: I should have done it sooner.
Fancy it? Join Stay22 free through my referral link here, get the script installed this week, and let your back catalogue start pulling its weight. Future you, once again, says cheers.
Small print: Commission structures, payout minimums and referral terms are set by Stay22 and its partner platforms and can change. Always check the live terms in your own dashboard before building your content strategy around specific numbers.
Ready to Let Your Old Posts Start Paying You?
Here’s the whole first step, and it’s almost insultingly simple. Sign up free, install one script, and tell your Partner Success Associate what links you already use. That’s an evening’s work at most, and it switches on earning potential across every accommodation mention you’ve ever published.
Your readers are already booking hotels off the back of your recommendations. The only question is who gets credited when they do. Might as well be you. Grab your free Stay22 account here and find out what your archive has been quietly worth all along.
And if you’re building out the rest of your affiliate stack, have a wander through my travel inspiration hub to see where bookable moments naturally live inside content. Steal the approach shamelessly.
Adventure on,
The Travel Tinker Crew 🌍✨
Tinker's Tip: After your first month, open the dashboard and find your top three converting posts. Then write more content just like them. Your own data is the best content strategy you'll ever get, and it's sitting right there for free.
Happy tinkering, and even happier earning!
FAQs
Is Stay22 free to join?
Yes, completely free. No sign-up fee, no subscription, and no traffic minimums. Stay22 earns a share of the commission bookings generate, so it only makes money when you do.
Which booking platforms does Stay22 partner with?
Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo, Kayak, TripAdvisor, GetYourGuide and Agoda, among others. You get access to all of them through one account, one script and one dashboard.
Do I need a big blog to join Stay22?
No. There are no minimum traffic requirements, and bloggers with only a few thousand sessions a month have joined and grown their income from there. It works for any size of site.
How does Stay22 pay you?
You request a payout monthly once your balance clears your minimum threshold, which varies by country. Payment arrives in your local bank account, in your local currency, within 30 days at most and usually sooner.
Can I use Stay22 alongside other affiliate programmes?
Yes, there’s no exclusivity. Plenty of bloggers (me included) run Stay22 for accommodation alongside Travelpayouts or direct programmes for tours, eSIMs and everything else.
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Nick Harvey
Hi, I am Nick! Thank you for reading! The Travel Tinker is a resource designed to help you navigate the beauty of travel! Tinkering your plans as you browse!
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