Affiliate Inventory | DiscoverCars.com

What it is

DiscoverCars.com is a car rental comparison and booking site operated by Discover Car Hire AS. It compares rates from local and international rental companies and sells its own Full Coverage insurance product alongside the booking. Travel and destination content sites are the typical partners.

The deal

The headline rate looks enormous because it is a share of DiscoverCars’ own margin, not of the rental price the customer pays. DiscoverCars puts a typical booking at roughly $20 to the affiliate, so read the percentage as a generous split of a thin slice. Insurance is a separate, smaller share. There is a tax clause worth reading before you sign: if you take payout as a business without a valid VAT or EIN number and DiscoverCars ends up paying tax on your behalf, both rates drop permanently across all your sales. The tracking window is a full year, which is unusually long and suits content that gets read months before a trip is booked.

Getting paid

Payment is tied to the trip, not the booking. A sale is validated a month after the car is returned, and it can only be invoiced once the rental has actually finished, so a booking made far in advance sits unpaid for a long time. The threshold is high by affiliate standards, so a low-volume site may accumulate for several months before anything clears. Payouts then land on a fixed day each month by bank transfer or PayPal, and accurate bank details must be on file before tracking is switched on at all.

The rules

The traffic rules are strict and they void commission rather than just warn you. Paid search, display advertising and social media ads are all prohibited, and any sale arriving without a referral URL can be treated as coming from a banned source. Metasearch clicks, for example from Kayak or Skyscanner, do not count. Review sites are not allowed to promote at all, while coupon and discount sites and digital marketing agencies need explicit sign-off from the affiliate manager. You cannot bid on the brand name, create social pages using it, or place links on sites that also carry gambling, adult, crypto or microloan advertising. Bookings paid for even partly with Booking Credit earn nothing, and you cannot register your own websites as sub-affiliates. DiscoverCars can also cancel any sales made in your first month if it cannot identify where your traffic came from.

Sources

• https://www.discovercars.com/affiliate
• https://www.discovercars.com/affiliate-conditions