In a bid to promote their products and services, online travel portals like yatra.com and travelguru.com are banking on affiliate programmes with websites and blogs. Through this route, the travel portals hope to increase visibility and conversions.

The portals have not only tagged the programme with attractive commission structures, which ranges from Rs 75 to 100 per flight booking and Rs 200 and above per hotel booking, but are also offering extra incentive for large conversions.

?For upto 24 hotel bookings per month, we pay Rs 200 per booking which rises with increase in bookings per month,? said Hari V Krishnan, vice-president, product and marketing, travelguru.com. ?We are asking them to reach out to us as it is an extremely viable model and gives us broader reach,? he added.

Travelguru.com expects contribution from affiliate programme to go up to 20%-25% from the current 5% by this year-end. Currently, travelguru has 200 odd websites under the affiliate programme including job and matrimonial portals, among others, and expects it to rise to 500 plus by the year-end.

?We will be undertaking a major marketing campaign to see that absolute numbers from the affiliate programme go up,? Krishnan added.

Yatra.com too is upbeat on the initiative launched recently and already has more than 300 websites under the affiliate programme. It expects it to go up to more than 1,000 by the year-end, said Nikhil Rungta, head of marketing, yatra.com.

Under the affiliate programme, the company that owns a website needs to register with the respective travel portal and in turn are provided with creative advertising banner by the portal on their website. When clicked, the banner directs the user to the respective travel portal.

?We will also be having customised advertising banner for certain categories like matrimonial websites. Further, the banner will be given a fresh look everyday,? Krishnan added.

However, cleartrip.com has no such plans. ?Such programmes target the bottom 10% of the internet traffic, making not much of difference, as 90% of it is controlled by websites like Yahoo, Google, among others,? said Hrush Bhatt, founder and director, product and strategy, cleartrip.com.