When I started my travel blog, I wasn’t thinking about how many different ways it could eventually make money. Like a lot of travel bloggers, I started by sharing our travels and tips that worked for my family. Over time, that turned into destination guides, family travel advice and resources designed to help other families plan their own trips.
But running a travel website costs money, and creating good travel content definitely isn’t free. There are flights, hotels, activities, camera equipment, website hosting, software and, perhaps most importantly, time.
Today, (and for the last 10 years) I look at my travel website as a business. And one of the biggest things I have learned in the last couple of years is that I don’t want that business relying on a single source of income.
Google traffic changes. Social platforms change. Brand budgets change. Affiliate programs change. So instead of depending on one thing, I make money from my travel blog in several different ways. Explore with Erin recently shared a lot about how she is thriving in 2026 so I wanted to do the same to show those who have not been creating content for the last decade how I do it today!
1. Display Advertising
Display advertising is probably the most passive way I make money from my travel blog.
You see those ads throughout articles when you visit many travel websites. The publisher earns money based largely on the traffic coming to the site and the ads being served.
Once you have enough traffic, display ads can be a great foundation because an article can continue generating revenue long after you publish it.
But for those building a site today, I would never want ads to be my only source of income (it was great in the past but with AI results in Google, there are less clicks to my website than in the past)
2. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is another important part of monetizing a travel website.
The concept is relatively simple. I recommend something useful to a reader and, when appropriate, include an affiliate link. If that reader makes a qualifying purchase or booking, I may earn a commission at no additional cost to them.
In travel, that could be a hotel, tour, rental car, travel product, eSIM or another service someone needs while planning their trip.
There are hundreds of programs available, and looking through some of the best affiliate programs for travel can give you an idea of just how many different options exist.
But I don’t think the answer is joining every affiliate program you can find. The links need to make sense. If someone is reading my guide to spending three days in a destination, a link to a hotel I recommend can be useful because accommodation is something they are likely thinking about booking.
If I am writing about a food tour I loved, linking to where a reader can book that experience is helpful. Dropping unrelated affiliate links into an article simply because they pay a commission doesn’t serve the reader, and it probably isn’t going to convert particularly well either.
3. Sponsored Content
Sponsored content is a much more active revenue stream. This is when a brand pays me to create content featuring its product, service or destination. Depending on the campaign, that might include an Instagram Reel, photography, a blog article, stories or a combination of deliverables.
One important distinction is that receiving something for free doesn’t automatically make a collaboration worthwhile. A hotel room has value, but I still have to travel there, shoot the content, edit photos and video, write the article or caption and then share it with an audience I have spent years building.
That is work.
For that reason, I approach brand partnerships as a paid service rather than simply exchanging content for free products.
4. Destination and Tourism Campaigns
Some of my favourite projects involve working directly with destinations. Tourism boards and destination marketing organizations hire creators to show travellers what there is to see, eat and experience in a destination.
These projects can be particularly well suited to travel bloggers because we can create several different types of content from one trip. A single destination campaign might result in social media content immediately, followed by evergreen articles that continue showing up in search results months or even years later.
I particularly like projects where I can build the coverage around the type of travel I already write about. For me, that increasingly means traveling with teens, sports travel, outdoor adventures, food and mom getaways. The closer the campaign is to what I naturally cover, the easier it is to create useful content rather than something that feels like an advertisement.
5. UGC and Content Creation
You don’t necessarily need a massive audience to make money creating travel content. UGC, or user-generated content, has become another way creators can work with brands. In this type of partnership, the value isn’t necessarily the audience you will publish the content to. The company is paying for your ability to create the photos or video itself.
They might use that content on their own social channels, website or advertising.
For travel creators who are good at photography and short-form video, this can open another revenue stream without requiring every piece of paid content to appear on your own channels. It also separates two things that brands sometimes lump together: content creation and distribution.
Creating a good video has value.
Publishing it to an established audience has value.
Those don’t always need to be sold as the same thing.
6. Travel Bookings and Activities
Travel content has an advantage over many other blogging niches: readers often arrive because they are actively planning to spend money. Someone searching for what to do in Tofino may eventually need a hotel. Someone researching a trip to Jordan may want a food tour. Someone planning three days in Tampa may need attraction tickets, transportation and somewhere to stay.
That creates opportunities to earn commission when readers book parts of their trips through links on my website. Again, context matters. I would rather have one useful booking link in exactly the right place than fill an article with ten links that have nothing to do with what the reader needs at that moment.
The goal is to make planning easier. If the link also generates revenue for the website, that allows me to continue producing the content in the first place.
7. Using My Blog to Create Opportunities Beyond the Blog
This one is harder to put into a neat income category, but it might be one of the most valuable.
A travel blog becomes a portfolio.
When I pitch a destination or brand, I can show them examples of the work I have already created. They can see how I write. They can see my photography. They can see how I cover a destination and how I integrate a brand into useful travel content.
Over time, that can lead to opportunities that aren’t directly tied to how many people clicked on a particular article that month. My work in travel has expanded well beyond simply publishing blog posts. Speaking opportunities, industry events, content creation and partnerships have all grown out of the authority and connections I initially built through my websites. That is difficult to measure in an analytics dashboard, but it has real value.
You Don’t Need Millions of Page Views to Make Money From a Travel Blog
One of the misconceptions about travel blogging is that you need enormous traffic before you can make money. Traffic certainly helps. More readers can mean more display advertising revenue, more affiliate clicks and more data to show potential partners.
But traffic is only one piece of the business. A smaller website with readers who are actively planning expensive trips can be valuable. So can a creator with a defined audience and a strong portfolio who knows how to create content brands actually want to use.
It also depends on what you want the business to look like.
Some publishers want millions of page views and a primarily advertising-based business. Others focus heavily on affiliate revenue. Some creators make most of their income through brand campaigns. There isn’t one model that every travel blogger needs to follow.
Diversifying My Travel Blog Income Has Become More Important
If there is one thing years of working online has taught me, it is that I don’t want my entire business controlled by one platform. Google can change an algorithm (and it has). Instagram can change what it shows people (remember chronological posts). An affiliate program can change its commission (AirBNB shut its affiliate program in the middle of COVID and that pissed off a lot of bloggers who has made a ton of content around vacation rentals). A brand can cut its marketing budget.
Any individual revenue stream can have a bad month or even a bad year.
Having several ways to make money doesn’t completely protect a travel business from those changes, but it means one change doesn’t necessarily take the entire business down with it. And I think that is particularly important now.
My travel blog isn’t just a blog anymore.
It is a website, a portfolio, an audience, a collection of evergreen resources and a way for potential partners to see what I can create.
The more ways those pieces can work together, the stronger the business becomes.
Lindsay Nieminen hails from Vancouver, Canada and shares her love of travel on this website. She is passionate about showing others that they should not put off traveling the world just because they have children or are single parents. She aims to encourage them to seek out adventure, whether it is at home or abroad by providing information on how just about everywhere can be a destination to explore as a family.