This is a guest post by Melissa Byron, creator and tour leader at A Solo Woman Traveling
When I started my travel blog in 2019, I dreamed of building a go-to resource for solo travellers, the kind of site people bookmarked for trip inspiration. I’m sure it’s a similar story to why you might have gotten started. You had a passion for travel, a knack for planning trips, and a love for finding hidden gems, and of course, you wanted to make money doing it. Who wouldn’t, right?
If you’re like me, you soon realized it wasn’t enough to just have a beautifully designed website, great recommendations, and solid travel planning skills. There was a whole lot more to it, am I right?
I’ll spare you the details of how many years I spent more than I made on this site and how giving up completely started to feel like a real possibility until I had a major shift in my business.
I knew I had to get creative, and once I did, using Stay22 made it that much easier.
After a few years of blogging, I realized I couldn’t keep waiting for people to stumble across my posts and maybe, hopefully, click on a link. I loved writing about solo travel, but the truth was, I needed to take my earnings into my own hands. I was tired of relying on algorithms and affiliate luck.
That’s when I decided to create something more personal: group trips for women who wanted to travel but not alone. It started small, just one trip to Portugal, but I could feel right away that I was finally doing something aligned with my purpose.
These trips gave me what I had been craving: real connection, shared experiences, and a way to turn my passion for travel into something sustainable.
When I started organizing my tours, I quickly realized I could still use the same tools I had been using as a blogger, just in a smarter way. Stay22 became a big part of that.
Because Stay22 links work with top booking platforms like Booking.com and Expedia, my guests could book instantly through trusted sites and I earned a commission automatically.
If I was booking a hotel for my group, I made sure it went through my Stay22 link. When a guest needed an extra night before or after the trip, I sent them my Stay22 link to book it. It was such an easy way to maximize my income without adding more work.
That’s when it clicked for me. I didn’t have to just hope for affiliate income anymore. I could actually create it.
Once I started using Stay22 links for my own group tours, it opened my eyes to how much more potential there was. I wasn’t limited to waiting for clicks on blog posts anymore.
I could use the same links to book travel for others and earn commissions along the way. For example:
I began helping other travelers and even friends with trip planning. When I booked hotels for them, I used my Stay22 links. It was a simple shift, but it made a huge difference. I was finally earning for the time and effort I was already putting into helping people plan their trips.
This was the moment my mindset changed. I stopped thinking like a blogger and started thinking like a travel business owner. I realized I could build multiple streams of income, not just from tours and blog traffic, but from creative ways to use tools I already trusted.
Stay22 gave me that flexibility. It let me create links for hotels, tours, apartments, and even map embeds that made booking seamless for my clients and easy for me to track. The more creative I got with it, the more my income grew.
Let's look at my performance over time. My tours always run in the summer/fall months, helping boost my overall traffic peaks as seen below:
As my business started to grow, I realized that affiliate links didn’t have to just live on my website. There were so many ways to use them that actually made sense for how I worked and how my audience booked travel.
💡 Pro tip: If you use trip itineraries or email confirmations, include your Stay22 links there, travellers are most likely to book right after receiving trip details.
If someone needed an extra night before a tour or wanted to extend their trip, I gave them a Stay22 link to book directly. It made things easier for my travelers and created an extra stream of income for me.
You can see below how using the Allez generator makes it easy for me to make links for travelers/tour participants.
What surprised me most was how flexible the platform could be. I could create custom maps showing all the hotels near our meeting point or the best stays in a neighborhood I recommended. It helped my guests make confident choices, and I earned a commission from bookings that were already part of their trip planning.
I started to look at every part of my business through this new lens. If I was already sharing resources, I wanted to make sure they were set up in a way that could support my business too. Stay22 helped me do that in an authentic, transparent way that still felt aligned with my brand.
Looking back, the biggest lesson I learned was that waiting rarely leads to growth. I spent years hoping my blog traffic would increase or that someone would finally click on a link, and all that waiting kept me stuck. The moment I decided to take action and create opportunities for myself, everything changed.
Using Stay22 was part of that shift. It helped me turn something simple, like sharing hotels I loved, into a flexible tool for earning real income. More importantly, it reminded me that I could build my business in a way that felt right for me.
If your travel business isn’t growing the way you hoped, maybe it’s time to look at what you already have. Sometimes the answer isn’t a new platform or a big rebrand. Sometimes it’s just getting creative with the tools in front of you.
Building group tours gave me the connection I was craving, and using Stay22 helped me make that growth sustainable.
In other words, I stopped chasing traffic and started building a travel business that worked for me.
Get started with Stay22 today!