Travel Brands: How Sharing Live Availability Affects Affiliate Sales Performance

The more information about our products we can share with affiliate partners, the higher the chance of a sale when the user lands back on our website.

It makes sense then, that sharing whether your property is actually available to be booked on the user's chosen dates is going to boost that conversion rate dramatically, as we're weeding out visits from guests that we simply can't provide stays for and focusing only on guests that we have availability for.

However, by removing unavailable products from an affiliate's results, could travel brands also be removing customers who might have gone on to book something else?

Here's the assumed scenario...

• An affiliate website presents a list of available properties from all the brands they are partnered with
• The user selects their travel dates and all unavailable properties get excluded from the results listings
• The user clicks on your brand's property, is passed through to your website and because their dates have been pre-vetted, converts into a sale comfortably.

But what happens if your property doesn't have any availability for those dates? YOUR property is excluded from the results listings and the user clicks a link to your competitor's website to complete the sale there.

Here's a scenario if we DIDN'T share the live calendar availability:

• An affiliate website presents the same list of available properties from their partnered brands
• The user is unable to exclude your unavailable property with the date filter, as you are not sharing live availability
• The user clicks on your brand's property, is passed through to your website and finds that it is unavailable on their chosen dates
• The user can then go back to the affiliate website to keep searching, or more likely, they will stay on your website and find something else they like, converting to a sale with you

To share or not to share

The answer to the question can be found by calculating which number is better: Less clickthrough traffic (at a higher conversion rate) vs. More clickthrough traffic (at a lower conversion rate).

This element of the question is of course not unique to the travel industry, all eCommerce brands have to think about traffic volume vs. traffic quality. However travel adds an extra layer of complexity because availability is constantly changing and a product being unavailable doesn't necessarily mean the customer can't be converted.

So, the real question isn't simply whether sharing live availability increases conversion rate. It's whether the increase in conversion rate is enough to outweigh the potential sales lost by reducing the number of customers clicking through to the brand in the first place.

What does the data tell us?

While there is limited published data looking specifically at live availability within affiliate marketing, there is research from the wider travel industry that gives us an indication of how customers behave when unavailable products are either hidden or displayed.

One particularly relevant experiment comes from hotel technology provider Mirai.

Mirai ran an A/B test over four weeks and more than 200,000 users who were searching hotel availability. Whenever at least one room type was unavailable, users were randomly divided into two groups:

• Group A was shown only rooms that were available.
• Group B was shown the available rooms, followed by the rooms that were already sold out.

The result was perhaps counterintuitive.

The group that could see the unavailable rooms completed 0.97% more bookings!

Mirai suggests that one possible explanation is scarcity: seeing that some room types have already sold out may create urgency around booking the remaining inventory.

But from an affiliate perspective, there's another interesting takeaway:

Removing unavailable products doesn't necessarily result in more bookings.

An unavailable product doesn't necessarily mean a lost customer

There's evidence that customers are willing to change their original requirements when what they initially want isn't available.

Bookassist analysed the behaviour of customers across hundreds of hotels using its Flexible Dates Calendar.

Of visitors who encountered unavailable dates during the normal booking process, 41% chose to switch to the flexible-date calendar and continue searching.

For example, a customer searching for a cottage from 15–22 August might be willing to travel from 16–23 August instead. They might choose another property, another room type or potentially another destination.

If the unavailable property is completely removed from the affiliate's results however, the customer may never reach the travel brand's website and therefore never be presented with those alternatives.

Unavailable products can even influence what customers buy

Academic research supports this behaviour too.

A 2026 study published in the International Journal of Hospitality Management examined the effect of displaying sold-out options across four experiments.

Researchers found that unavailable products continued to influence customers' choices between the products that remained.

For example, when a mid-tier hotel option was shown as sold out, customers became more likely under certain pricing conditions to choose the higher-priced alternative. When the highest-tier option was sold out, customers shifted towards the middle tier.

In other words: A product doesn't necessarily stop contributing to a sale simply because that particular product can't be purchased.

Let's put the two scenarios into numbers.

Imagine an affiliate generates 100,000 travel searches for your brand's products.

Without live availability, the affiliate displays relevant properties regardless of whether they're available for the customer's selected dates. This results in 20,000 customers clicking through to your website.

Some will discover that their chosen property isn't available and leave. Others may change their dates or find an alternative property.

If 400 of those visitors eventually make a booking, your affiliate conversion rate is:

400 bookings ÷ 20,000 clicks = 2% conversion rate

Now let's give the same affiliate access to your live availability.

Unavailable properties can be filtered out before they're shown, meaning customers are much less likely to click through to something they can't book.

Traffic falls from 20,000 clicks to 12,000, but those customers are considerably better qualified.

As a result, your conversion rate increases from 2% to 3%.

On the surface, that's an excellent result:

Your affiliate conversion rate has increased by 50%.

But 3% of 12,000 visitors produces 360 bookings. So while conversion rate has increased by 50%, the actual number of bookings has fallen from 400 to 360 — a 10% reduction in affiliate sales.

Conclusion: Share availability, but don't necessarily use it as a filter

The evidence points towards a more nuanced answer than simply choosing whether or not to share live availability.

Travel brands should share live availability with their affiliate partners. Giving affiliates more accurate information allows them to prioritise bookable inventory, provide a better customer experience and send better-qualified traffic.

However, the data doesn't support the assumption that unavailable products should automatically be removed.

Mirai's A/B test of more than 200,000 users found that displaying sold-out room types alongside available inventory resulted in 0.97% more bookings than showing available rooms alone. Meanwhile, Bookassist found that 41% of customers who encountered unavailable dates continued searching when offered flexible alternatives.

An unavailable property, therefore, doesn't necessarily represent a customer who can't be converted. They may change their dates, choose another property or ultimately book something entirely different.

Ultimately, the success of live availability sharing shouldn't be judged solely by whether affiliate conversion rate increases. The more important question is whether it generates more bookings and more revenue overall.

So, should travel brands share live availability with their affiliates?

Yes, but sharing the data and deciding what to hide are two very different things.