The million-dollar question about the travel influencer work is: How can we make money while traveling?
I guess somewhere along the way, you have wondered about that question too.
Right away, we can tell you that the possibilities of monetizing the work of a travel influencer are endless. The more you use creativity, the more ways you will find to earn money traveling. This post will mention how we make money from partnering up with hotels.
How to make money traveling by partnering up with hotels
There are mainly two ways an Influencer can partner up with hotels. They are the Barter system and Paid partnerships.
Barter System
A barter system is currently the most common between hotels and influencers. It’s when the influencer creates the content in exchange for staying at the hotel and enjoying its amenities.
In the barter system, you don’t get paid any money but consider it as the influencer having “benefits” at work.
I’ll give you an example. Some companies give their employees food stipends as part of their salary, right? So it’s not money per se, but instead of spending money on food, you can use the food stipends.
It’s the same here. In the barter partnership, you won’t be getting paid actual money. Still, you can keep your money by saving on daily expenses such as rent and food.
It’s important to say that when you become a travel influencer, you open your own business.
Think about a coffee shop for a second. To open a coffee shop, you will have to invest. You will have expenses like furniture, renting a place, hiring staff, etc. Likewise, you will also need to invest in your business when you become a travel influencer.
You will have partnerships that are not paid, especially at the beginning. You must invest in building a portfolio and showing the following clients you have experience.
As I said, it’s an investment in your business. It’s normal not to make a profit when you start. We LOVE traveling, and being able to work anywhere in the world sounds like a dream to many people.
But in the barter system, the bills will still be there waiting for you when you return home. So that’s when you want to jump into the second way to work with hotels: paid partnerships.
Paid partnerships
There are tons of ways hotels can pay you to work with them, and these are some of the most common ones:
1. When a soon-to-open hotel hires you for one job
This happens when a hotel hasn’t opened yet and needs content to start its social media. They need photographers, videographers, and models. For example, we recently worked with a hotel in Sri Lanka, where we got paid for a day of shooting as models at this hotel. We didn’t work either as influencers or photographers but only as models.
2. When the hotel hires you to create all the content
This is the case when you do all the work, including being the models, photographers, and videographers. You create the entire content and delivery it to the hotel. That content goes directly to the hotel, and you don’t need to post it on your platforms.
3. When you do both: create content and do the influencer job.
It is the case in which you will do both: create all the content for the hotel and promote it on your platform. For example, we recently did this with Pollicastro/ Torre del Parco, a hotel in Italy. We got paid to create content for them and publish a few things on our social media.
4. When you just do the influencer work
This is when you get paid to promote a hotel on your platform without needing to deliver extra content.
It’s been harder and harder to find this type of work as hotels don’t usually pay money in exchange for posts on social media anymore.
They can pay for your flights to go there and so on but not pay you money per se.
In this last case, a way you can monetize if they just want you there as an influence,r is taking extra content and trying to sell it to them afterward.
We recently did that with a hotel in Mallorca. We didn’t have any agreement beforehand to sell them our images. Our partnership was just to stay at the hotel in exchange for exposure on social media (the barter system we explained previously).
However, we ended up creating some amazing extra content there. We showed the hotel this edited content and asked if they’d like to purchase it. And there you go!
Hotels usually need good content for their social media. So selling what you create is a really effective way to monetize while traveling.
Final Thoughts
So these are some of the ways you can work with a hotel and make money while traveling. There are so many other ways you can monetize as a travel influencer. If you’d like to know more about it, let us know in the comments.
Also, if you are interested in starting in this profession, subscribe to our channel and check out the videos on the subject.
