New hotel booking websites seem like a dime-a-dozen these days. When you get as many press releases in your inbox as we do, it often feels like one of the big start-up pushes in the online travel market is for hotel booking engines, and newcomers are trying to do their best to differentiate themselves from the crowd.
Unfortunately, when it comes down to it these sites are all pretty much the same. So what can a business do to be different?
Well at Yonderbound, one of the newest sites on the block, your participation could lead to commissions to help you travel more! Intrigued? We were, and we decided to look into the opportunity more closely to see what it is all about.
Help Other Travelers, Make Money
On the topic of new start-ups in the hotel booking world, it seems like the trend for 2014-2015 is review oriented sites, where users provide detailed accounts of their experiences and personalities in order to lend a credible voice into the review.
That is a great direction for the industry, but the one thing I have against most consumer driven review websites is that at the end of the day your review is going to make another company money. It feels good helping other travelers plan their adventures, but unless you are self-publishing your advice on a blog your knowledge will always end up helping someone else make money.
That doesn't seem quite right, does it?Sure, Yonderbound syncs up to big review sites like TripAdvisor so you can have access to all of those reviews when booking without having to leave the site. But one way this service is trying to be different is that it pays you money when you build a dedicated recommendations list, called a Yonderbox, and travelers make a booking from your recommendation (you can see one of ours from Dubrovnik here). So if you always thought you could make better recommendations than those on TripAdvisor who often seem to have no idea what is going on, now is your chance to do it and make a commission to be spent on future hotel bookings from it in the process!
How much money can you earn? Commissions may vary from property to property, but for every $100 in booking Yonderbound estimates an average return if $7 to the owner of the referring Yonderbox. Not a bad return even if you refer just a few bookings per month, and this offering is a great step for the industry to go towards in order to provide a meaningful connection between brands and customers.
Enjoy a $10 Credit Towards Your Next Stay!
The best part about this post is that we're not just sharing the opportunity for you to earn money by making hotel recommendations. We're actually giving you money for signing up at no work on your part!
Our friends at Yonderbound are letting us give away $10 credits for new users to use on their first hotel stay. So even if you don't publish Yonderboxes or do anything to try to earn money from the service, you can still take the $10 credit and use it as you see fit on your next hotel booking!
When it comes to earning free money to travel just from clicking a link, you can't get much better than that.
This article was brought to you by our friends at Yonderbound. All opinions featured are our own.
