When I started Beat That Flight, the goal was pretty straightforward: find genuinely cheap airfares and make them easier for people to discover.
In particular, I wanted to focus on travellers in Australia and New Zealand.
There are plenty of global flight search tools, but Aussie and Kiwi travellers often face a very different set of opportunities. Our geography means long-haul travel is a fact of life, international fares can vary wildly, and a great deal from Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland or Christchurch can look completely different from what is being promoted to travellers in Europe or North America.
Beat That Flight is built around finding those opportunities and getting them in front of Australian and New Zealand travellers.
That part has never really changed.
What has changed is the scale of the site, the amount of work involved in running it, and the need to make the whole thing sustainable without turning it into something readers no longer enjoy.
For a travel deals site, that creates an awkward question:
How do you make money without putting the best deals behind a paywall?
For me, affiliate partnerships have become an important part of the answer.
Keeping the deals free
There are plenty of ways to monetise a website.
I could charge subscriptions. I could sell access to premium content. I could cover pages in display ads. I could publish more sponsored articles.
Some of those models work extremely well, but I have always liked the idea that someone in Australia or New Zealand should be able to visit Beat That Flight, find a cheap fare, and act on it without first being asked to sign up for a paid plan.
Cheap flight deals are most useful when they are easy to access.
A fare from Auckland to Asia or Sydney to Europe can disappear quickly. The last thing I want is to add unnecessary friction between someone spotting a deal and deciding whether it works for them.
Affiliate partnerships allow me to keep the core Beat That Flight experience free while still generating revenue when a reader goes on to book something.
Monetisation that fits what readers are already doing
The big advantage of affiliate marketing in travel is that, when done properly, it fits naturally into what a reader is already trying to do.
If you are on Beat That Flight, you are probably already thinking about travel.
You might be comparing flights, checking dates, researching a destination, looking at accommodation, or simply trying to work out whether a surprisingly cheap fare from Australia or New Zealand is worth jumping on.
Relevant travel links are not a complete change of subject.
They are often the next step.
That is very different from trying to monetise the site by showing someone an unrelated product simply because an advertising algorithm thinks they might click it.
My view is that affiliate partnerships work best when they are useful first and commercial second.
If a link helps a reader continue their travel search or book something they were already looking for, it makes sense to include it.
If it does not, it probably should not be there.
Where Travelpayouts has helped me
One of the challenges with affiliate marketing is that it can become surprisingly fragmented.
Travel is a huge industry, and there are countless companies, booking platforms, and affiliate programs.
Managing separate relationships, dashboards, payments, and reporting systems can become a job in itself.
That is where Travelpayouts has been useful for me.
It gives me access to a wide range of travel brands through one platform, which makes it easier to work with relevant travel partners without having to manage every relationship completely independently.
For a small travel business focused on the Australian and New Zealand markets, that matters.
The value of Beat That Flight is in finding and highlighting cheap fares that are relevant to travellers here. Time I spend dealing with administrative complexity is time I am not spending improving the site, analysing fares, publishing deals, or trying new ideas.
Travelpayouts has helped simplify part of the commercial side of running Beat That Flight.
It has not changed what the site is.
I am still focused on finding and sharing cheap flights, with a particular focus on where Aussie and Kiwi travellers can go for less.
What Travelpayouts has done is make it easier for me to build a sustainable business around an audience that is already interested in travel.
Affiliate revenue is not guaranteed revenue
One thing I think is sometimes missed when people talk about affiliate marketing is that putting a link on a page does not magically create income.
Readers still need to trust the site.
The offer needs to be relevant.
The placement needs to make sense.
And most importantly, the reader still needs to find something they actually want to book.
That means I have a strong incentive to keep producing genuinely useful content.
A bad deal does not become a good deal because there is an affiliate link attached to it.
If a fare is not genuinely interesting for Australian or New Zealand travellers, there is little point pretending otherwise.
The long-term value of Beat That Flight depends on being selective.
I want people to come back because they believe the deals are worth looking at.
If I lose that trust, the monetisation model becomes irrelevant anyway.
It also gives me room to experiment
Another benefit of working with a broader affiliate platform is the ability to test different types of travel products and partnerships.
Not every idea works.
Some things that seem like an obvious fit for a travel audience generate very little interest.
Other services can be surprisingly useful to readers.
Being able to experiment helps me understand more about what Australian and New Zealand travellers actually need after they discover a cheap flight.
That might be continuing their flight search, comparing accommodation, or working through the other parts of a trip once a cheap fare has made the destination possible.
The important part for me is that those experiments should not get in the way of the main reason people visit Beat That Flight.
The cheap fares still come first.
Building a sustainable free travel site
Running a travel website has real costs.
There is hosting, infrastructure, software, data, and a fairly significant amount of time involved.
As Beat That Flight has grown, so has the complexity behind it.
Affiliate partnerships help me support that work. They also give me a model where the site’s interests can remain reasonably aligned with the reader’s.
Beat That Flight does well when people find useful travel opportunities.
For a site focused on helping Aussies and Kiwis find unusually cheap flights, that is a much better fit than simply trying to maximise page views at any cost.
Travelpayouts has been an important part of making that model easier for me to manage. It has given me access to relevant travel partnerships while reducing some of the complexity that comes with running multiple affiliate relationships.
But none of it works without the people who actually use Beat That Flight.
So, a genuine thank you to everyone who reads the site, follows the deals, shares them with friends, and trusts me when a particularly ridiculous airfare appears.
And thank you to those who book through links on the site. It does not cost you extra, but the commission Beat That Flight may receive helps cover the costs of running the site and keeps the deals free for everyone.
That support means I can keep doing what I built Beat That Flight to do in the first place:
Finding cheap flights for Australian and New Zealand travellers and sharing them for free.