
Ask HN: How to monetize a travel site? - beatthatflight
I&#x27;ve built up a travel deals website over the past 7 months in Australia (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.beatthatflight.com.au).  As it&#x27;s grown, I&#x27;ve grown several hundred followers on FB, an email subscriber list of hundreds too.  I know, that&#x27;s still small change, but it&#x27;s been fun to see it grow.<p>I currently &#x27;monetize&#x27; by using a white label payout program. People search for flights on my site, buy a ticket, and boom, I get a tiny commission.  However, it&#x27;s not much.<p>I&#x27;m debating how to grow this further. Any suggestions? I don&#x27;t want to alienate my audience, but I would like to start earning more than a few dollars a month.  I love finding deals and still get a thrill when I find an error fare, so I do well on that side, but in terms of growing&#x2F;monetizing I&#x27;m starting to run out of ideas.<p>Possible directions:
 - start charging for immediate deals, and keep my free subscriber list getting once a week summaries of deals found.
 - Chuck advertising on the page. Not really sure how effective that&#x27;d be and whether it&#x27;d turn people off.
 - I&#x27;ve considered making a bunch of infographics and sharing them around some sites to get traffic, but I feel it&#x27;s the conversion I&#x27;m failing a bit on at present. Eg 5000 flight searches might translate into 3 tickets bought.  I don&#x27;t know if that&#x27;s normal but it &#x27;feels&#x27; low?
 - Hand search for people. Like flightfox did, but ... it&#x27;s not terribly scalable.<p>Anyway, I&#x27;d love ideas.<p>Tech summary: I built it on wordpress, mailchimp newsletter, FB&#x2F;twitter&#x2F;instagram posts, google analytics,  plugged into a whitelabel system, and monitor google news and other deals emails for bargains. Plus &#x27;artful&#x27; searching - sometimes it&#x27;s possible to feel a deal out, if that makes sense.
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tixocloud
Have you checked out similar services to see what they do? I.e. Scott’s Cheap
Flights?

[https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/scotts-cheap-
flights-...](https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/scotts-cheap-flights-from-
small-side-project-to-booming-business-de62ca54b1)

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beatthatflight
Indeed, I follow Scott's. I'm nervous about monetisation by charging though,
in case I lose a lot of subscribers. Thanks for the link!

