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Webinar Replay: Behind The Scenes of KAYAK’s New Mega Affiliate Network

Here’s the replay and Q&A from our Travel Massive LIVE with the folks behind KAYAK’s new Affiliate Network — which will combine KAYAK-brands including HotelsCombined, Momondo, CheapFlights, and checkfelix into a single affiliate network, to rule them all.

We heard from KAYAK’s Strategic Partnerships team  — Eva Fouquet, James Stavrou, and Anna Jimenez who answered all our questions about their new affiliate network, which is due to launch in Q1 2020.

👉 Sign up for early access at affiliatesignup@kayak.com

Catch the webinar recording and check out our Q&A section below —

Here’s a summary of key take-aways —

Affiliate marketing should be win-win

Eva Fouquet has been working in the affiliate marketing partnerships area for more than 13 years, and was based in Sydney for six years, working at HotelsCombined before KAYAK acquired them in 2018. She’s now based in France.

Eva shares that affiliation is about partnership and human support – both parties working together – and that affiliate marketing should be win-win.

Eva shared the history and context behind the development of the KAYAK affiliate network:

  • The DNA of HotelsCombined has always been B2B affiliate marketing.
  • They saw the opportunity to merge the affiliate knowledge strength from HotelsCombined with KAYAK and their brands – including Momondo, CheapFlights, and country-specific brands.
  • This initiative is called KAN – The KAYAK Affiliate Network, to bring all the KAYAK brands under one roof.
  • KAN will be arriving in Q1 2020.

One size does not fit all

James Stavrou oversees the global business development strategy for KAYAK’s strategic partnerships. James says that they took the learnings from running a successful affiliate program at HotelsCombined to KAYAK’s affiliate network.

James shared the top feedback they’ve had from their affiliates, which is being used to shape the development of KAN:

  1. A dedicated account manager to talk to – on the phone or by email. Having one contact who can help you with flights, hotels, or other products is important to the affiliate partnership.
  2. Realtime reporting in the dashboard – they will be able to do this across a number of different verticals in one place.
  3. One dashboard for hotels, cars, flights and all products – so affiliates can more easily scale their partnership.
  4. Simplifying the affiliate agreement, so it only includes the essential items.

James shares that flexibility is important as affiliates want to customize their offering. One size does not fit all. There is always room for improvement, so the portal will be constantly evolving.

From Deep Links to White Labels

James says they’ve been careful to allow affiliates to access a suite of customizable products, including deep-links, data feeds, white-labels, and API so that partners can tailor to their services and audience.

James shared the KAYAK explore platform, showing visitors a map of where they can go for how much. It also allows thematic based recommendations – ie: outdoors, city break, beach. This will be available to affiliates as an API and a white-label.

Almost everything you can see on the KAYAK site will be available to affiliates in the new year.

Who is KAN for? According to James, everyone – bloggers, comparison websites, marketing agencies, and startups will all be able to benefit.

James says the best way to start is to have a conversation with the KAN team.

Nurture and support

Anna Jimenez heads up up the account management team globally at KAYAK. Anna explains that the KAYAK affiliate team want to nurture their relationship with affiliates and are there “all the way” to support their partners.

They try to respond in less than 24 hours to affiliate queries, and they have a dedicated team to provide support.

The KAN account team is based around the world — in London, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Zurich, Sao Paolo, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Seoul, Sydney and more.

Another strength of KAN is they can share the best practices from around the world, since they are talking every day with their partners.

Travel Massive LIVE Q&A

Here’s the Q&A from the webinar below —

Q: Who can work with the KAYAK Affiliate Network (KAN)?

Everyone. There’s no restrictions.

We want to be able to talk with everyone about this. With all the different verticals we have now – flights, hotels, cars, etc., and the different brands that we have (Kayak, Momondo, HotelsCombined, checkfelix, swoodoo), there are a lot of things that we can touch in terms of products.

KAN is not exclusively for bloggers or content creators. It’s great for existing blogs if you want to add some new travel verticals on your website. If you are a comparison website, we can help you. If you are a cash back website, we can help you. We can work with airlines, marketing agencies, startups.

There’s nothing off the limits at the moment. We want to speak with everyone. We can adjust to your individual needs.

Q: What’s the minimum amount of traffic that is required to work with you?

There are no minimum requirements in order to take part in KAN. We accept all types of websites, all types of categories and we always discuss with you to find the best way to integrate our products. Anyone can be part of the affiliate network.

We’ve seen some affiliates starting with 100 visitors per week and now they’re one of our bigger affiliate partners, so we’ve been able to start with them from the beginning, nurture them and grow with them. We do believe that putting a minimum traffic requirement is not a solution.

Q: Where can I sign up?

You can get in touch with us by email at affiliatesignup@kayak.com or connect with Anna, Eva or James on LinkedIn. After that we can set up a call and discuss the best way to start with KAN.

Q: Is it possible to use KAN without coding?

Yes, it is a very simple integration. It’s either a fully-hosted white label on our side, where we do all the heavy lifting, or it’s a simple iframe integration, where we provide you with the code, which you can embed on your website’s header or footer.

Q: What are the affiliate revenue share percentages?

Every brand and vertical is going to be based on revenue share.

The percentage can be up to 50-55% and we are assessing that in terms of volume and other criteria. It is always case-by-case and we adapt depending on your medium.

We don’t have a set percentage, we asses every opportunity individually and we have a conversation about what we think is going to work.  If you’re interested in having that type of conversation, we can have a call, find out what you’re doing and how we can help. If we can agree on a way that we’re both happy with, then we can go ahead and implement it.

Q: Are you still going to pay advertisers per CPL?

We’re not going to continue with CPL (cost per lead), we’re going to have something completely aligned. This is based on research we’ve done with the affiliate partners and we’ve decided to have a revenue share for all the programs within the network.

Q: What’s the best way to find out what’s possible with the API?

We have a dedicated Integrations team, and they are experts on API and white label. They are the ones that make everything possible with your tech team or yourself.

So once you get in touch with us, we’ll put you in contact with the Integration Team to explore the possibilities with API – sometimes it is not the right solution and so you can explore other options as well. But as we’ve said, everything is possible so you need to discuss with the team and find the best solution for you.

Q: I have a meta search engine. Can we integrate results from your engine?

It is always a possibility to create such a partnership. We have to see how we can complement each other and what a beneficial partnership would look like for both sides. It is something to be discussed in more details with the team.

Q: Do you have teams in Asia?

We do have offices in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Seoul, Bangkok, Australia that help us offer the best services in every region. We’re scattered all over the world.

Q: Do you have plans to add tours and excursions in the future?

We’re not against adding new products in the future if the opportunity arises. Right now, with the launch, we’re not going to have tours but we’re not saying that we’re never going to expand to more types of verticals.

We really want to nail it with what we have now within the group. What would be next we don’t know yet but we’re definitely open in the future to make KAN the most sophisticated and complete network. This is why we call it a network and not a program – because we see it as a travel experience that can be as open as possible so you’re able to pick and choose any type of vertical within the network.

Right now you can have some similar options on the website. When you go to kayak.com/deals, you have a whole bunch of different experiences –whether it’s tickets to an NBA game or tour packages, there’s a much bigger mix there. But in terms of its own dedicated vertical, we’re not ready to go there just yet. But the Deals tab is available for affiliates as well.

Q: Is the HotelsCombined affiliate program still going to exist or disappear?

HotelsCombined will remain.

We’ll keep the same integration, the same revenue share program, reports. We’re going to rebrand it through KAN but you will have access depending on what you’re signed in to. The current affiliates of HotelsCombined will have more access to data and features through KAN.

Q: How do we offer our services through KAYAK? Do you consider reciprocal partnerships?

Possibly. Send us an email with more information about your idea, products and offers, and we can connect you with the right people internally to see if there’s a good opportunity.

Q: Is KAN GDPR compliant?

Yes.

Thanks for tuning in.

At the start of each LIVE webinar, we ask attendees to share where they are tuning in from.

Here’s a quick shoutout to the following members for sharing — Vito from NYC, Julie from Kenya, Panagiota from Athens, John from Dublin, Andrea from Tobago, Caroline from Cork, Ireland, Sotiria from Athens, Robert from Miami, James from Limerick, Ireland, Isabel from Malaysia, Patricia from Edinburgh, Jillian from Detroit, Alison from London, Julian from China, Austin from Malawi, Don from San Francisco, Lynn from Sun Valley, Idaho, and Robin from the UK 🤗

 — Thanks to everyone for attending our Travel Massive LIVE, and to the KAYAK Affiliate team: Eva, James and Anna for answering our questions!


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