Maximize your points & miles
We believe in full transparency. Here's exactly how Award Optimizer earns money — and how it affects (or doesn't affect) our recommendations.
Award Optimizer is free to use. We earn small commissions when you click affiliate links on our site and make a booking — at no extra cost to you. These commissions help us keep the site running, the data updated, and the tools free.
Affiliate relationships do not influence our award chart data, program rankings, or editorial content. We never rank a program higher because of an affiliate arrangement — only because the CPP math says so.
We are a publisher in the CJ Affiliate network (Publisher ID 101720496). When you click a booking button on our destination or blog pages and complete a reservation, we may receive a commission from these partners:
| Partner | What They Offer | Network |
|---|---|---|
| Hotels.com | Hotel search & booking worldwide | CJ |
| Expedia | Hotels, flights, vacation packages | CJ |
| VRBO | Vacation rental homes | CJ |
| Orbitz | Hotel & flight booking | CJ |
| Travelocity | Hotel & flight booking | CJ |
| CheapTickets | Discounted flights & hotels | CJ |
We are also a partner in the Travelpayouts network (Publisher ID 706871, Project "Awardoptimizer"). Partners include:
| Partner | What They Offer | Commission Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Klook | Tours, activities & experiences worldwide | 2–5% |
| Tiqets | Museum, attraction & event tickets | 3.5–8% |
| Kiwi.com | Flight search including multi-stop routes | ~3% |
| Aviasales | Cash flight price search & comparison | Revenue share via Travelpayouts |
We also use Skimlinks (Publisher ID 299634X1787430), a service that can automatically convert ordinary outbound links on our pages into affiliate links at the moment you click them. If a merchant we link to participates in the Skimlinks network, we may earn a commission on your purchase at no extra cost to you. Skimlinks may set cookies to attribute those purchases — see our Privacy Policy for details.
We are not in any credit-card issuer affiliate program. We hold no direct commercial relationship with Chase, American Express, Capital One, Citi or Bilt, and no bank pays us to recommend a card.
Card Apply buttons point to the issuer’s own application page. Those outbound links can still be monetized automatically by Skimlinks (described above) if the issuer participates in that network at the moment you click — so we mark them rel="sponsored" as a matter of course, whether or not a particular click earns anything.
Every card link on this site now points at the issuer’s own published application page. Two short referral-style links previously appeared on our beginner card guide; because we could not confirm what they were attached to, we replaced them with the standard issuer URLs rather than leave an undisclosed relationship in place.
Card rankings are scored by the Optimizer Score formula — sign-up bonus value, net first-year value, transfer partners and everyday earning. None of that weighting is influenced by whether a link earns us anything.
Affiliate links on this site are marked with rel="sponsored" in the HTML. They appear in two places:
Award data, program rankings, and editorial analysis on Award Optimizer are never sponsored or paid for by any airline, bank, or travel company.
If you have any questions about our affiliate relationships, email us at hello@awardoptimizer.com.
Last updated: August 6, 2026.