Frequently Asked Questions

TPN is dramatically different than our competitors. Many of our most successful partners started out with other online travel companies, and have since selected TPN as their long term Internet partner. Here are some of the reasons why we are the best travel affiliate program to grow and prosper with:

• We pay higher commissions
• We build your brand, not ours
• We do not compete with you or market to your customers
• Our advanced Partner Support Center (back office) is at your disposal
• You can offer a wide range of travel products
• Our Save Rate Hotels make up one of the world’s largest proprietary discount hotel programs
• Qualified partners may use our custom XML interface for hotel bookings
• Utilize exclusive, flexible OPTI-FEES to make more money
• Use our powerful e-marketing tools
• We have a highly experienced tech support team
• You will experience less downtime with our redundant databases
• Customers can call our toll-free 24/7 reservations center
• 24/7 toll-free customer service

The Travelocity Partner Network, which includes World Choice Travel, Inc., Travelocity.com, Zuji and LastMinute.com, has been a leader in private-branded Internet travel programs for over 10 years. Founded in 1996, Travelocity.com was the first website that allowed consumers to access Sabre Inc.’s extensive fare and schedule information and purchase tickets without the help of a travel agent or broker. Our booking engines can be found on thousands of websites in over 40 countries. The Travelocity Partner Network has the experience and reputation you can trust.

Websites based outside North America are encouraged to become TPN travel affiliates. TPN has partners in over 40 countries. Sites outside of North America can profit from our hotel and car rental engines, marketing resources and destination content. Our hotel booking engine is available in English and Spanish, currently. The hotel and car engines can display rates in multiple currencies, and with Dynamic Currency Conversion, your customers can pay for their merchant rate hotel reservations in several different currencies. Air ticketing is limited to the Western Hemisphere, Europe and other selected destinations at present; transactions are displayed in US currency. The hotel booking engine is available in both European and North American date display formats. Once you become a TPN partner, these and other international options can be configured in our Partner Support Center.

In order to be approved for our travel affiliate program, we ask that your site meet the following criteria:

• You plan on implementing the WCT/TPN booking engines on your site within 30 days.
• You will not feature our competitors’ booking engines on your site without TPN authorization.
• You are confident your minimum sales will include no fewer than 40 hotel or airline bookings per month.
• You have experience with online marketing and driving traffic to your website, including Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
• You must submit proper tax documentation (US Federal W8 or W9 form) within 10 business days or the account will be automatically closed.

While our services are free, we do require that you have a business/marketing plan developed for us to better assist you. A member of our Partner Relations Department will review this with you upon contact.

Disclaimer: The above criteria are general guidelines for being accepted into our travel affiliate program. We reserve the right to approve, deny or terminate partner agreements at any time.

If your company does not meet the guidelines for a private-branded partnership with World Choice Travel or TPN, we highly recommend the branded affiliate program of our parent company, Travelocity. The Travelocity program lets you affiliate your website with the best brand in online travel – Travelocity – and earn a commission every time you refer one of your customers to them. With just a few clicks of the mouse, you can start selling travel in no time. No programming is necessary, and there are no startup fees involved.

For more details about the Travelocity affiliate program or to become one of their affiliates, please visit Travelocity’s affiliate program or send an e-mail to affiliates@travelocity.com

Websites approved for our travel affiliate program may not contain travel booking engines that compete directly with the WCT/TPN booking engines. However, occasionally we will work with sites featuring multiple providers if approved in advance by our business development team.

Yes. Some of our most successful partners have increased their monthly income greatly by operating many travel-oriented websites.

There are NO setup fees or membership charges for websites approved for our travel affiliate program.

This depends solely upon how serious you are about growing your online travel business. TPN provides the travel products and the marketing tools; we also have the highest payouts among travel affiliate programs. It is up to you to utilize marketing strategies that include search engine ranking, e-mailing newsletters, and other marketing tools to attract customers to your website.

For more details on our payouts, please see our Commissions page. TPN handles all collections, saving you and your staff time and money. Commissions are paid on average of 30 to 90 days after checkout. SAVE RATES and OPTI-FEES can generate cash even faster. Electronic wire transfers will be available in the future.

TPN partners producing a significant number of reservations every month may qualify for our generous override program, in which we pay higher commissions for bookings. Many of our large partners enjoy these higher commission rates, and consequently, sizable payouts each month. Our goal is for our partners to make more money! High-volume producers may also be eligible for their own private-branded toll-free telephone number serviced by our call center personnel.

One way of earning more is by promoting Save Rate (which pay a higher commission than Published Rate/GDS bookings, i.e. ones made through Pegasus or Sabre). Save Rates have fewer cancellations and increase your cash flow because these bookings are prepaid. The easiest way to increase profits and cash flow is with our exclusive OPTI-FEE program. OPTI-FEES on hotel and car bookings give you the option of earning additional revenue through service fees for travel services booked via your website. Please see our Commissions and OPTI-FEE pages for more details.

Checks are sent monthly. The minimum payout is US $100. For those sites that do not earn enough commissions in a month to total $100, the commissions are carried over until the next month.

No. Unlike other online travel companies, we do not directly compete with our own partners. Our parent company, Travelocity, is a leading OTA, but does not market to TPN Partner customers unless they are signed up as members of Travelocity.com and opted-in to receive newsletters.

Absolutely, as every partner site is branded with its own private label. You also have the option of using our XML interface for hotels, which provides an even deeper level of customization. We also brand e-mail hotel and car rental booking confirmations with your website name.

As an added bonus, TPN brands each Save Rate hotel listing to reflect the name of your website or travel business. When a customer selects a Save Rate hotel, the rate plan is labeled as “Yoursitename.com Discount Rate.” This is another example of an exclusive branding feature that other programs do not offer.

Yes! You can choose from a broad array of travel services, including hotel reservations, car rentals, cruises, airline tickets, vacation packages, tickets to shows and attractions, and great travel deals.

You can instantly monitor your hotel and car bookings, commissions and more in our Partner Support Center, which serves as your own password-protected back office. Partners can run reports on reservations, individual bookings, OPTI-FEES, commissions, client information, statistics on visitors and bookings and much more. If you maintain multiple travel affiliate sites, you can track them as a group or individually, and you may also implement sub-affiliate tracking.

The Travelocity Partner Network puts an entire team of experts at your disposal, including assigned tech support staff. Our online Partner Support Center also serves as a resource for helping you run and maintain your travel site.

The Travelocity Partner Network is an industry leader for MARKETING SUPPORT. We have several different kinds of merchandising pages to help you promote travel products and special offers. We have developed e-newsletter technology that enables you to help create your own, private-branded newsletter in less than five minutes. We provide ongoing consultation services at no charge and we furnish you with the means to collect opt-in customers for your database. Aggressively build your business, and we’ll stand ready to help you prosper.

One of the greatest benefits to your customers is the number of hotels offered through our hotel booking engine. Visitors can browse accommodations and rates at over 130,000 hotels worldwide in nearly 10,000 cities.

Competitive pricing will keep your customers coming back. We feature over 50,000 Save Rate hotels with deeply discounted rates. Our cruise engine offers some of the best deals in the world (from one of the largest cruise suppliers in North America). Our airline ticket engine allows extremely fast searches of most major airlines to get the best rates, with flexible dates and destinations as well as clickable seat maps. We also offer a prime selection of special travel deals, with great combination rates on hotels, cruises, airline tickets and vacation packages.

Our well-designed and privately branded booking engines are fast, convenient and secure. All credit card transactions are handled in a secure environment that conforms to rigorous PCI standards. Your customer will have peace of mind knowing that they are dealing with a reputable, established travel company in good standing with the Better Business Bureau, ASTA and IATA.

As our partner, your site will be able to provide these comprehensive features:

• The widest array of travel services
• The ability to earn extra income from hotel and car service fees
• Hotels in thousands of cities, not just a handful of metropolitan areas
• The largest inventory of online hotel brochures
• Hotel videos, pictures, descriptions and ratings
• Merchandising pages to help you sell hotels and packages
• Dynamic Currency Conversion (DCC)
• Innovative features such as “My Hotel List”
• Interactive mapping and destination information
• Competitive rates for airline tickets and car rentals
• Attractive vacation packages in which customers can combine, Flight, Hotel, Car and more
• Selling tickets for shows, attractions and rides

With our customizable XTra (XML for Travel) interface, you can turn lookers into bookers with an attractive and sophisticated presentation of travel information. XTra/ XML is more flexible and powerful than standard HTML encoding, and allows you to configure search forms and results pages to your liking. With this deeper customization, your brand is strengthened. Increased functionality and improved appearance provided by our XML interface can gives you the competitive edge that other travel booking engines cannot. Please note that before incorporating XTra, your site must meet certain requirements. Please contact us for details.

Yes. You can program our hotel booking engine to feature hotels only in specific destinations, making it perfect for sites specific to particular geographic areas. You can also specify individual hotels or hotel chains to promote.

With a choice of over 75,000 hotels worldwide, our hotel booking engine has direct access to the Published Rate hotel inventory databases of Pegasus and Sabre as well as our own extensive merchant hotel program. Our own merchant hotel inventory allows us to offer thousands of Save Rate hotels at discounted rates while paying a higher commission.

You can have customers make reservations directly with you, or you may direct them to our call center. Our call center handles reservations 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Callers will be asked for the particular promo code associated with your partner account (the last few digits or your site’s ID code), so that you are able to receive your share of the commission. Larger partners may qualify for special privately branded numbers that do not require the use of promo codes.

Please note that hotel reservations made to our call center pay 30% on gross commissions, whereas calls made to you and online sales pay up to 60% commission, depending on the type of rate.

Customer service operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In the U.S. and Canada, customers may dial toll-free 1-888-254-0637. International callers may dial +1 210-507-5997 (toll call) from anywhere in the world or 00-800-84469370 (toll-free) from the following countries: Belgium, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Singapore, United Kingdom.

Published Rate bookings that are made online pay out 50% of the total gross commission to us. Published Rate reservations made through our call center (via telephone) pay out 30% of the total gross commission. Save Rate hotel bookings pay a higher commission than Published Rates on both online and telephone bookings. In addition to commissions, payments for online bookings may also include your share of OPTI-FEES. OPTI-FEES on telephone bookings are not available.

Click the Join Now button of our website. Review the terms and conditions, and fill out our form, including your Payee information. Send us the online application. Once your application is submitted, a Partner Relations Manager will contact you to go over your marketing and development plans and give final approval. You can then log in to the Partner Support Center and start to configure the booking engines and layout of your website.

If you are presently producing a high volume of hotel bookings with another provider, please contact Sean Fernandez, Senior Manager, WCT/TPN Business Development to discuss opportunities with World Choice Travel and the Travelocity Partner Network.

Implementation is easy. Your private-labeled travel products can produce revenue for your company the same day you are approved to become a partner.

If you have a limited development budget and want to quickly launch an entire travel channel for your website, check out our Ready-to-Use Travel Home Page. Simply select your color scheme, customize the header and your travel site will be ready to launch.

It’s easy to switch. We can provide a helpful conversion spreadsheet to simplify the process for converting codes etc. from other travel affiliate programs.

If you have any additional questions about our travel affiliate program, please feel free to e-mail us at partners@wctravel.com.