Travel Blogs Rode Credit Card Referrals Wave: What Comes Next?
Photo Credit: The Points Guy moved into new office space in 2017. It racked up big revenues on credit card referral fees. TPG Architecture
Skift Take
If you wanted to make money in travel media in the past decade, credit card referral revenue was the best bet. But now that stream has dried up. Will it return?
In the past decade, some travel bloggers became millionaires — sometimes several times over — by publishing breezy posts about world travels, complete with detailed reviews of business class seats and hotel rooms suites. Now that business is in peril, and it's not clear when, or if, it will return.
No one caught the points trend quite like Brian Kelly — you know him as The Points Guy — who began writing about travel while working at Morgan Stanley about a dozen years ago. What started as a hobby soon became a profession, with Kelly selling Americans on how they could use points to take "free" vacations.
A few years later, he sold his company to Bankrate, for an estimated $20 million, according to Business Insider. He's still CEO, but along the way morphed into something of a points celebrity, popping up on the network morning shows and Live with Kelly and Ryan to talk about deals, and in the business press to discuss airline earnings.
To the uninitiated, Kelly’s site
