How irBarcelona Makes Real Money Travel Blogging
A decade and a half ago, Diego Aleu launched a hobbyist blog, writing about a city he had visited and loved: Rome. Next, he blogged about London. But the blog didn’t truly get “serious” until he started writing about his home city, Barcelona.
Today, what started as a creative pastime has become a profitable publication called irBarcelona. Tourists from all over the world visit the site to find out where to go, what to do, what to eat – and how to buy tickets to attractions – in Barcelona. The site is now available in five languages: Spanish, English, French, German, and Italian.
It’s a remarkable story, but the path from hobby to income wasn’t a direct one for Aleu. For a long time, irBarcelona was truly a labor of love, requiring hours and hours of work with little financial return. But for the project to grow and be viable long-term, Aleu knew he needed to find a practical way to make money travel blogging. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to keep doing what he loved.
That’s why Aleu began to investigate affiliate partnerships. One really good affiliate partnership can make all the difference, providing the bulk of sales for a travel blogger. And in fact, the pivot point for Aleu was engaging in an affiliate relationship with Tiqets — now responsible for 65% of the affiliate income irBarcelona brings in.
The backstory: Trial and error affiliate efforts
The idea of affiliate partnership wasn’t brand new to Aleu before he teamed up with Tiqets. Back in 2007, when he first started blogging about Rome, he engaged with the Italian website Venere.com, a reservation portal later acquired by Expedia Group. “I started working with them after seeing that tourism content creators had such affiliate programs on their websites,” he explains, “and I tried to apply to more affiliate programs, too. But in many cases, they required you to register as a freelancer, and with the little money I earned at the time, I could not afford it.”
Eventually, those rules changed for some of the affiliate programs. Aleu says, “I finally decided to apply to an affiliate program of the Barcelona Turisme portal, since they had eliminated the requirement to be a freelancer.” Over the years, he partnered with other travel portals as well.
Relatively new to the scene in 2016, Tiqets approached Aleu via email to suggest a meeting. Aleu was intrigued by the platform and saw how it could work well not just for the affiliate, but for tourist customers. “I chose to partner with Tiqets because of the interest they had shown in collaborating,” Aleu says, “and because I could see that the project had so many possibilities of succeeding – which it has.”
Read on to find out how Tiqets solved three specific challenges for Aleu when it came to monetizing his travel blog while still maintaining his creative touch.
I chose to partner with Tiqets because of the interest they had shown in collaborating,
and because I could see that the project had so many possibilities of succeeding – which it has.”
Diego Aleu
CEO and Founder of irBarcelona
Challenge 1
Maintaining a personal touch
Partnering with bigger companies always brings a risk of getting lost in the fray of a whole bunch of affiliates. It was important to Aleu to forge a partnership with a site dedicated to maintaining contact and working directly with him. Teaming up with Tiqets wasn’t just a way to tack a little bit of revenue onto an existing content model. As the partnership took off, Aleu was pleased that he was always able to get strong support from Tiqets.
Partly this was because of Tiqets’ dedicated affiliate support team, which was available for a lot of handholding. The support team exists to help Tiqets' affiliate partners optimize their accounts and get questions answered quickly, and Aleu champions how Tiqets worked with him closely as his blog and affiliate efforts evolved: “I enjoy the dedicated partner support team. Everything has been easy, and they’ve done a spectacular job.”
Tiqets’ support team especially seemed to understand the specific tourism industry he was in. Because Tiqets is an international company with regional managers in cities around the world, they're able to keep up with the situation in the tourism sector on a regional level.
Challenge 2
Satisfying a wide range of interests with a wide range of products
Recognizing the possibilities of the affiliate partnership with Tiqets served as an incentive for Aleu to create even more content. “After seeing the initial results of my partnership with Tiqets,” he says, “I was motivated to create new content that allowed me to include more Tiqets products that, up until that point, I hadn't written about.”
Collaborating with Tiqets empowered Aleu to improve the quality and accessibility of his recommendations. With Tiqets, he could also offer a smoother user experience because readers could instantly book tickets to attractions he recommended via a portal that tracks the sales. Because Tiqets has such a deep inventory of tickets to global attractions, Aleu was able to monetize a multitude of Barcelona-based museums and attractions as he wrote about them.
Collaborating with Tiqets, I managed to take a leap in quality,
offering visitors to my website a portal where they could purchase tickets for certain museums and tourist attractions.”
Diego Aleu
CEO and Founder of irBarcelona
Challenge 3
Weathering a crisis
Over the years that Aleu has worked with Tiqets to monetize his irBarcelona travel blog, he’s been impressed with the variety of products offered on the Tiqets platform, the personal assistance he’s consistently received, and, particularly in the last year or so, the resilience Tiqets has shown in supporting attractions and partners through a pandemic.
In spite of the hits the tourism sector took because of COVID-19, Aleu's Tiqets affiliate sales have recently grown from an initial 25% to 65%. Resilience and flexibility during a pandemic situation allowed Aleu to continue writing about the right travel experiences for right now. He says, “One of the things I like most about Tiqets is their resilience. During the pandemic, they worked hard to create more suitable products for the difficult situation in which we found ourselves."
A relationship with legs
It’s now been over five years of partnership between Tiqets and irBarcelona. When Aleu hit the keyboard for that very first blog post back in 2007, he could never have imagined that a decade and a half later, he’d have a fully flourishing travel advice business with a healthy income.
Writing from the heart about a city he loves – and making the right affiliate partnership choices – has led him down a rewarding path.
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