Shaft Affiliate Partners


NB: Title Changed by Nick W, one of the largest uk travel portals last week changed their affiliate offering with minimal notice to any affiliates. The merchant in question is now offering 7 day cookies, down from 28 and now is only allowing one sale per cookie, not unlimited as it was.

So come on people tell me who, on a first search to a travel site, books their holiday?

I think they may loose a great deal of traffic very quickly.

Ps. FYI Expedia are still offering 28 cookies and unlimited sales per cookie.


funny things

I can understand they had to change things due to loosing money but what funny things were appearing.

are you relating to the back office for the affiliates??

the truth as I see it

Lastminute has had an unchanged affiliate system for years, with the same T's and C's etc. All they were interested in was increasing turnover. One day someone tried to work out if they were making money from these sales and investigated the affiliate network and many other things. They realised they were loosing money, but also some funny things were appearing.

What would you do?


More Here...


follow on to 'payment withheld'... LM have now sent the 'we know what we're doing and are on top of things and you will get paid' email to affiliates - albeit a piss-poor excuse for crap business practice.

Payment withheld

They're also - with no notice before/during/after - withholding commission payments due to affiliates. Although the line from CJ is 'no worries'... it suggests LM don't have the cash.

lastminute update

I as started the thread I thought I would update evryone what is happening.

Well after discussion with lastminute they informed me that they were completely reviewing their affiliate campaigns as they were loosing money on them. They had found some strange things going on and wanted to investigate more, read into that what you will:) the only way they thought they could investigate this properly was to effectively stop their affiliate campaigns for the moment.

They believe they will be back soon with some form of proper offering.


Lastminute are offering loans dating, gambling etc

But not paying comission on commision junction for this.

They do have a loan affiliate deal, but if you send them traffic for it and it converst into being a hotel sale etc you don't get paid.......nice one boys:)

I have lots of personal dealings with Lastminute and do like them personally, but guys and girls please get your offering sorted.


Lot of dodgy travel merchants

There was a flurry last year over HotelClub a suubsisiary of Cendant who also own, Trevelodge, HoJo among others.

Basis of HotelClub scam is they sign up punters that come from your site for their "club", and you will never get commission again, even if they come from your site a second time, because they have joined the club.

aff and merchant

We also are an affiliate and a merchant, but we don't chnage our offerings without atleast talking to the people it may effect.


Too true

>Being a merchant can be tough.

Oh I wouldn't dispute that for one minute, its certainly a difficult path to tread with all sorts of competing constituencies to attend to. The boardroom wants year on year increases, the managers of the programs run out of options or lack the nous to develop new ways of improving efficiencies and increasing market share/profitability so look to what would seem to be the easy route of paying the aff less, in the belief that most will simply suffer it, detailed in some of the reasons outlined previously.

Im not knocking companies who look to improve their bottom lines, its how some go about it thats the issue. Theres plenty to go around, the key thing for me in whatever deal I get involved in is transparency and fairness, dont P on my back and tell me its raining kinda thing.

I guess Im of the school that says "don't bite the hand that feeds you" or "look after those who put food on your table.."

wow measured in days?

I thought any merchant worth his salt offered cookie timeouts in months or years... not days.
It will be their problem.
Being a merchant can be tough. Sometimes it seems the affiliates have the easy bit. I know, as i do both :)

Five knuckle shufflers.

Why cant these players just treat people properly? Why do they take the do people up the Gary route?

I worked with these people some time ago and had nothing but problems problems and problems.

The final straw for me was when some fecked up 404 page that said Oops!, yes Oops! which decided to appear when my visitors clicked their b3 aff links. The bottom line being, they gave the visitor a 404, and an option to go to their homepage.It may as well of said Rob can go eat shit, cos thats all it would have paid for!

Was I told there was a problem? No. Did they respond to my emails when I enquired? No. Rude, just plain rude. Courtesy costs zilch.

Oops! but guess what, the links arent there anymore.

It is a worrying trend, some of these people treat us with an almost sneering contempt; thats gratitude huh? Bring them traffic and they give you an unsolicited kick in the bollocks further down the road..its almost like "Thanks for the traffic guys, thanks for the money, thanks for helping us build our brand and heres a poke in the eye with a sharp stick for your help"

Crazy just crazy, why dont they get the fact that we can just up sticks and take it all elsewhere?

Im working with another company at the moment who are beginning to piss me off with their BS and sneakiness. Its all take take take with no real give other than a pittance of a commission far lower than what they'd otherwise pay to a high street travel agent. The sad thing is they used to be very good indeed, and they got really successful and now the rots beginning to set in. They are doing stuff like, directly competing with their affs, when at the outset they did not (and actively courted you on that basis), using their aff traffic to solidfy and enhance the workings of its newly created product offerings,communicating with your visitors, sharing less info, etc etc. I dont blame them of course, thats business and all that stuff, but its a PITA nonetheless.

Im kinda stuck in that better the devil you know than the devil you dont groove though..If you up sticks and go with another provider you are then faced with the reality of having to rejig everything to fit with the new guys, go through the trust/relationship hoops etc and then its a risky proposition as you dont *really* know whether they are gonna be any better or worse than the people you are already working with.

Oh well, nothing worth having was ever easy eh?:D


There sales were good but not good enough on the new deal:(


They can't be in trouble

they owe too much money to be in real trouble.

In the bricks world where I used to live, there was a business saying that went something along the lines of:
"You know a company is in trouble when they fire the salesmen."

so can someone tell me

what their conversions were like for affiliates? I've never been involved with their affiliate stuff and I've always wondered how well they did since on the whole their prices are on the higher side of competitive.

Short sighted indeed

they just created a load more competition.

They simply CLOSED that sales

They simply CLOSED that sales channel, didn't they