The global online travel market was valued at $600 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow to $800 billion by 2028.
At the same time, an increasing number of travel businesses have reported adopting AI-based solutions to grow revenue and improve customer experience.
The most common application of AI in travel and tourism reported was personalized recommendations, a role traditionally occupied by travel magazines and bloggers, both big and small.
When readers wanted to know the best or the cheapest hotel in destination X, they often turned to bloggers or publishers for answers.
Large corporations are investing heavily in AI-based content personalization and recommendation solutions to capture a piece of this lucrative pie. Airbnb, for instance, bought a stealth-mode AI-based startup for a reported $200 million to provide a more “personalized experience for its users.”
However, publishers, whether large or small, can rarely afford to invest such amounts in new technologies. Is there any way, then, for publishers to stay relevant?
Stay22 positions itself as a solution to this very problem.
In this review, we delve deep into this new AI-based monetization solution for travel affiliates that claims to help publishers increase revenue without impacting their user experience (UX).
What Is Stay22?
Stay22 is an affiliate solution for travel content creators that smartly leverages AI to monetize users’ travel intent when they visit a travel publication online.
It does this by determining a user’s buying intent based on a numerical value that it terms “travel intent score” and showing the user the right products that match their travel intent. Stay22 claims to calculate this score by examining a comprehensive set of over 50 parameters relating to a website, its content, and its audience.
In practice, this can mean redirecting visitors to a platform such as Booking.com or Expedia each time Stay22’s AI determines a sufficient travel intent. Visitors can then book hotels, buy tickets, or complete other purchases from such platforms, translating into an affiliate commission for the travel publisher.
This raises the obvious question—why not work directly as an affiliate for Booking.com or Expedia rather than having Stay22 as an intermediary?
Alternatively, why not join any travel affiliate networks that flood the market?
This is because
Stay22 claims several users have reported up to 3 times more conversions from using Stay22 than from working directly with Booking.com or Expedia.
Since Stay22 delivers content personalization using first-party data, publishers don’t have to worry about third-party cookie deprecation.
Its suppliers include some of the most prominent names in the bookings and events domain, including Booking.com, Expedia, Trivago, Hotels.com, Get Your Guide and Tripadvisor.
As of 2025, Stay22 works with over 3,000 partners and claims to have generated over $500 million in gross merchandise value (GLV).
Stay22’s Pricing and Features
Stay22 works on a commission basis with publishers. The split usually starts at 30% for Stay22, often the same as what publishers would’ve had to work directly with an online travel agency.
However, given the much higher conversion rate most publishers experience when working with Stay22, this translates into more significant revenue overall.
Stay22 is based in Montreal, the largest city in the Francophone Canadian province of Quebec. As a result, the platform’s lexicon has a quirky little French touch, which we found to be a fresh change from the drab, business-like product names we usually encounter.
It calls its bouquet of travel solutions Let Me Allez or LMA, ‘Allez’ being French for ‘go on’ or ‘go for it’. Here’s what’s included in LMA:
1. Roam (Formerly Called Optimized Redirects)
In the previous section, we discussed how optimized redirects take readers to the booking platform most likely to convert. However, optimized redirects are capable of even more.
A common practice among travel bloggers using affiliate links is to add the link to the homepage of the platform they want to redirect the user to. Optimized redirects leverage AI and machine learning (ML) to transform these homepage links into context-rich deep links.
For example, suppose a user is reading a blog post about Bali. The blog owner has an affiliate partnership with Trivago for hotel bookings and has inserted an affiliate link to the Trivago homepage. With LMA’s optimized redirect, users are taken to a search result page specific to Bali instead of being taken to the Trivago homepage upon clicking the affiliate links. This, in turn, results in more conversions.
In addition to optimized redirects, Roam also fixes broken links and 404 redirects.
2. Nova AI Booking Agent
Nova is a triggered popup that appears on a website when Stay22 detects that a user is highly intent on purchasing a travel-related product such as a hotel, a tour package, a flight, etc.
The popup opens in a separate window and subtly pushes users to buy their desired product. Even if the user does not complete the sale in that session, publishers still stand a chance to earn a commission if the user buys something within the cookie duration period.
The beauty and efficacy of Nova lie in its subtlety. The popup is triggered for a specific user only once every 40 days across all Stay22 sites they visit. For example, if a user visited a site powered by Stay22 today and encountered Nova, they are not likely to see the popup again for the next 40 days.
Nova’s booking agent appears for only 3% of all users and only those with a very high travel intent, as determined by Stay22’s algorithm, ensuring that user experience is not unduly disrupted.
3. Spark Affiliate Link Creator
Spark is Stay22’s AI affiliate link creator.
It scans a page’s content for missed affiliate opportunities and inserts hyperlinks into existing content without changing any on-page content. This saves publishers the trouble of manually inserting links.
Spark is a smart tool that does not overdo hyperlinking. On average, it inserts only about 2.7 affiliate links per page and does not place links too close to the existing affiliate links a publisher may have created.
Stay22 reports that its customers have seen an average of 12% increase in bookings by using Spark.
Getting Started With Stay22’s Dashboard
To start using Stay22, publishers need to insert a few snippets of code provided by Stay22 into their website. While tech-savvy publishers can do this independently, the Stay22 team is happy to assist them.
Publishers can use Stay22 and any traditional affiliate network they already use. However, they need to inform the Stay22 team of this so that they can set up the code accordingly. This will ensure that Stay22’s features are available across all affiliate links, irrespective of the network or affiliate the publisher is working with.
Once they have their code set up, publishers can log into the Stay22 dashboard. It’s a relatively simple dashboard that gives publishers a granular view of all the metrics they need to monitor.
Let’s dive in.
Dashboard
The dashboard is the first thing publishers see when logging into their Stay22 account. It summarises the most important metrics publishers need to be aware of. These include:
- Total Revenue
- Total Bookings
- Average Commission
- Average Nights
Publishers can use the buttons at the top right to change the time frame for the above-mentioned metrics from monthly to daily to weekly.
Scrolling down displays two graphs showing publishers how their monthly commissions and bookings have been performing month-on-month.
Bookings
While the dashboard tab gives a top-level view of bookings, the Bookings tab lets publishers examine the numbers that matter.
For instance, while the dashboard tab only allows for viewing monthly or daily figures, Publishers can use the Bookings tab to select specific date and time ranges, look up data for previous years, choose the commission type, which is to say, CPA or CPC, and also look up the commission received from each supplier, such as Booking.com, Expedia, AirBnB, etc.
Finally, publishers can export all the data on this page to a CSV for viewing and analyzing offline.
Analytics
The Analytics tab shows publishers how users interacted with the Stay22 interactive map feature. The metrics present here include:
- Loads: This shows the number of times the Stay22 map loaded for a user but is not necessarily seen by them.
- Views: Shows the number of times a user viewed the map after getting loaded.
- Interactions: The number of times a user interacted with the map, such as using its filter option, dragging the map, or clicking on any of the various buttons on the map.
- Clicks: Shows the number of times a user clicked on the map’s price pin, or an allez link redirecting them to one of Stay22’s service providers
- Bookings: Shows the number of times a user booked with a provider.
Page Analytics
This is where publishers can see which pages perform best based on bookings, commissions, clicks, and earning-per-click metrics. This allows publishers to optimize their content strategy by doubling down on the best content.
Stay22 admits that the analytics here may not always be accurate. For instance, sometimes, it may be unable to track the referrer accurately, and such fields may only show “unknown” for the referrer.
Publishers with multiple domains can add all their domains from the Settings tab and make them available for analytics.
The only catch is that booking data is only available from March 10th, 2024. Any data a publisher may have before this date is not available.
Payments
This is where publishers can track their accumulated earnings and add or modify payout methods.
Stay22 shows earnings in US$ and allows payments via PayPal, e-check, and wire transfer.
Publishers must accumulate a minimum of $100 to be eligible for PayPal payouts and $500 for wire transfers.
Commissions can be redeemed 7 days after the checkout date of a booking.
Publishers can also use this tab to view all their past payments.
Settings
The Settings tab allows publishers to check and modify routine information such as name, email ID, and domain(s).
Publishers can also use this tab to invite new users to join Stay22 using an invite code.
The tab also offers access and permission control options, allowing the owner to limit what each new user can access and edit.
Publishers can also use the tab to generate and manage API tokens for their use or with third-party integration, such as Affilimate.
Help and Support
Stay22 markets itself as a human-centric platform. As such, it offers email and chat-based support for its users. The company is based in Montreal, Canada, and users can expect prompt responses, subject to the time difference based on their location.
Stay22 offers extensive resources for developers who want more out of their Stay22 experience. For instance, its Map developer documentation page contains resources allowing developers to create multiple Stay22 maps, which they can use for all their pages.
The website also contains extensive resources for those interested in integrating Stay22’s dashboard data-sharing tool with third-party platforms.
A help center also contains answers to the most common user questions.
That said, Stay22 is a relatively simple platform, and most users will unlikely need to dial in customer support frequently. It took us just a few clicks to set up and get going, and once set up, we didn’t feel the need for any help or support.
Stay22 in Review
When we reviewed Stay22, we were pleasantly surprised to find that it has features that make the interface somewhat simple. So here’s a quick summary of what we liked the most about it and where we think it could improve further.
What We Love About Stay22
- Easy to set up and use
- A smart and nuanced AI that knows not to go overboard with recommendations
- Publishers can use Stay22 along with other popular travel affiliate networks, in effect unlocking new revenue streams that may have been previously inaccessible
- Not dependent on third-party data for personalization and is GDPR compliant
- Allows advanced users the freedom to customize
- Reasonable commission-based pricing
Where There’s Room for Improvement
- Could provide more accurate page analytics
- Limited historical data available for analysis
Overall, we feel that Stay22 is a solution that delivers on its promise. Not only does it make advanced AI capabilities available to even small and medium-sized publishers, but it also leverages this AI to generate more revenue for publishers. This gives travel publishers and hotel affiliates a fighting chance to stay in the game against large tech corporations with deep pockets.
The best thing about Stay22 is that publishers can use it without giving up on their existing travel affiliate solutions and impacting their UX. So, there’s practically no downside to adding Stay22 to your website or blog, and we have no hesitation in recommending Stay22 to travel publishers looking to add additional revenue streams to their affiliate marketing strategy.
