Stay22: Our Experience with the Platform after a Year of Use (+400%)

In this article “Stay22: Our Experience with the Platform after a Year of Use (+400%)”, I’ll share how today this blog earns 60,000 CZK to 80,000 CZK per month just from accommodation bookings on Booking.com made through our links in articles. A year ago, however, it was only around 10,000 CZK. What changed? We implemented scripts from the Stay22 platform, which optimizes link placement and brings in higher commissions than Booking itself.

What is Stay22?

Stay22 is a platform that offers commissions for bookings of accommodation, flights, and experiences on the largest booking websites such as Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, or GetYourGuide (they added this in October 2024).

There are many similar aggregation platforms, but Stay22 stands out from the rest:

• better terms in individual programs,
• AI tools that help extract more conversions from your content.

[BONUS FOR YOU] 100 USD for the First 100 Confirmed Bookings

I’d rather mention this right at the beginning. If you decide to try Stay22, use my link. You’ll get an extra 100 USD for the first 100 bookings. ✨

Register with a 100 USD bonus

What’s the Biggest Added Value for Me?

Before I dive deeper into how the platform works and how we use it, here’s a quick TL;DR. Originally, we worked directly with Booking.com (we are one of the few who got into their direct affiliate program), but due to the set conditions (the user had to make a booking immediately after clicking, no cookie was stored in their browser, so the affiliate was session-based) we never earned significant money, even though we had decent content quality and traffic.

Stay22 has a 24-hour cookie with Booking. This means that after clicking from our website, a cookie is stored in the user’s browser, and if they make an accommodation booking within 24 hours, a conversion is attributed to us, and we receive a commission (provided, of course, the user utilizes the booking). This feature alone boosted our conversions by at least 30% without us having to touch the content.

Stay22 has a set of tools that work without my assistance and bring additional conversions:

• For example, it’s the automatic opening of a window with accommodation offers in the background when Stay22 thinks the user is ready to make a booking.
• It’s the automatic adjustment of affiliate links – it never happens that a user clicks through to a hotel that is already sold out.
• It’s the ability to embed beautiful maps with accommodation deals in the given location.
• It’s the automatic insertion of affiliate links into articles where the script thinks it’s appropriate (works great!).

🚀 400% Year-over-Year Increase in Commissions

That’s right. ☺️ Of course, it varies month by month, but here’s a simple statistic:

• January to June 2023: 299 bookings, 2,801 USD commission
• January to June 2024: 731 bookings, 13,319 USD commission

Of course, we worked on content throughout the year, so not everything can be attributed to Stay22. But look at this: we had 144% more bookings, but 375% more in commissions! 🤯

This means people generally booked longer or more expensive stays. And it makes sense – for a more expensive vacation, you need to think and research a bit – you might make the booking 2-3 hours later. And that was already too late for us with Booking.com. But with Stay22, we’re collecting these conversions too. ✌️

Here are graphs from the table I keep on this. We implemented Stay22 around October 2023:

Switching from Booking.Com to Stay22 – how much Will it Hurt?

That’s a question that probably bothers every travel blogger. It’s fine! 😆 If you already have links from the Booking.com affiliate program on your website, you don’t have to worry about anything. Just install the Stay22 script, and it will take care of everything.

It “translates” links into their own links on-the-fly, which has one crucial advantage. If Stay22 doesn’t work for some reason, your original Booking.com link will still remain in the article. This saves us a few conversions every month. 🙏

So, the transition takes about five minutes, just to install the script. It also doesn’t matter if you use any cloaking mechanism for affiliate links (like the BetterLinks or ThirstyAffiliates plugin) – just write to Stay22, and they will customize the script for you for free.

Anyway, I recommend continuing to add affiliate links from Booking.com’s affiliate program even after implementing Stay22 (if you have one, of course!), otherwise, you can simply use them.

How much Does Stay22 Actually Pay You?

Stay22 has an agreed commission rate with Booking and other platforms. You won’t find out exactly how much it is anywhere, but we can estimate. Booking directly offers us up to a 40% share of its mediation fees (from what accommodation owners pay Booking) – we consistently received 25% to 30%.

But that’s an offer for us, ordinary travel bloggers. Stay22 likely has multiples of bookings and thus achieves a better share; I can imagine it’s easily 60-70%. And they share this with you.

In our case, we get 55% of their commission; it’s somewhat negotiable and depends on the turnover you bring through Stay22. And 55% of 60% is more than just 30%. 😊 So, by switching to Stay22, you certainly won’t harm yourself; at worst, you’ll be on the same commissions but for many more bookings. 🫶

Stay22 Tools – What all Can We Implement on our Website

Affiliate Link Generator – Allez Generator

You know how it is. We joined a new affiliate program, and for the life of us, we couldn’t figure out how to create deeplink affiliate links. They always have it hidden in some submenu, and it’s difficult to work with.

Stay22 has solved this elegantly – a simple page where you can paste a link to any accommodation, flight, or experience – and you’ll get an affiliate link back:

The links are dynamic in a way – meaning they remain the same, but they send different users to differently personalized pages, addressing:

• User geolocation (they send some to .co.uk Booking, others to .com)
• Language and currency – it always shows Czech and CZK to Czechs
• And more, about which Stay22 doesn’t write anything extra in its documentation 😆

Let Me Allez (LMA) – AI Script for Automatic Link Insertion

One of the features that truly impressed me about Stay22 is Let Me Allez. This AI-powered script can automatically identify the best places to insert affiliate links in an article.

For us, this theoretically means we don’t have to manually adjust every link – Let Me Allez takes care of it automatically and completely naturally. It precisely identifies where the reader needs an immediate booking option and places the link to accommodation or a flight to the given destination where there’s the highest chance of conversion. We insert links via booking.com (as I wrote, just to be safe), but LMA also adds other links.

• Personalized results – theoretically, each user will see a slightly different accommodation offer after clicking – according to Stay22, this feature increases the number of bookings by up to 10%.
• No more 404 pages – LMA quickly tests each page after a user clicks, and if it results in a 404, it redirects the user to another, most relevant page with a similar offer.
• Nova AI Booking Agent – you won’t see this agent anywhere, but if it senses that the user is ready to book, it will show them an offer in a new window.

Interactive Maps / ListView

This feature is more suitable for event pages, but it’s another nice way to show users accommodation offers in a certain location. Here’s an example of a map in Dubai – all links from it are affiliate links.

Detailed Statistics

I also really like the statistics that Stay22 offers. It’s much more detailed than what you get from Booking. Statistics are per page and per booking. So you can see which pages on your website are earning you the most money:

Individual booking statistics are also great, and you can filter by language versions (if you have them on your website). At a quick glance, I can immediately see what and which cities are currently being booked the most, what the booking statuses are (whether they are just created, already paid, or ready for payout).

Payouts from Stay22

Another crucial question – how often and reliably does Stay22 pay out commissions?

How Often Do They Pay out?

Reliably: Stay22 pays out once a month, or rather, you can request a payout every 30 days.

After a payout request, Stay22 has 30 days to process the payment – usually, they process it in about 3 weeks, and then I have to wait a few more days until the button for the next payout becomes available.

Where Can the Money be Sent?

They have a pretty good payout partner (Tipalti), so you can choose any currency (including CZK) and essentially any account – I have USD sent to me (to save on currency conversion, as I spend it abroad anyway) to a Czech account at Airbank.

Do You Need to Tax the Income? And how?

Stay22 is a Canadian company, so your income comes from abroad. The income needs to be taxed like any other (including VAT in the annual settlement), and you must be registered as an identified person with the tax office. However, this applies to any foreign affiliate program outside the EU.

That’s all! If you’re interested in anything else, don’t hesitate to ask; I’ll be happy to answer anything in the comments. ✌️