I can answer that question of yours: you appeal to the cheapskate and that doesn’t give companies any incentive.

Your blog is focused on discounts, savings, freebies, bonuses, and other bargain hunting. It’s EASY for travel companies to get chatter about discounts, so they’ve little need for you in particular. Even more so when the audience you attract is not a profitable group for travel providers.

If, however, you had a completely different blog which focused on quality, luxury, experiences, and other non-monetary aspects of travel, then I think travel providers would find your audience to be a profitable bunch worth pursuing.

It’s that simple. There’s not much interest in chasing cheapskate customers.

Is RCCL Manipulating CruiseCritic.com (owned by TripAdvisor)?

From Jaunted (Conde Nast):

Royal Caribbean Cruises Has Web 2.0 Viral Infection

No surprise here: Royal Caribbean Cruise Line has a viral infection. For once, however, it’s not the Norovirus but that new-fangled byproduct of Web 2.0, the viral marketing infiltration. According to Consumerist, a group of fifty “Royal Champions” was outed by their own creator, the Customer Insight Group, as being a successful project whereby frequent positive cruise commenting on sites such as CruiseCritic was rewarded with free cruises and other perks.
So what’s the big deal? Well, it seems that the “Royal Champions” weren’t always up front about their status as compensated reviewers, effectively misleading readers of CruiseCritic forums with their positive comments. Add to this the fact that CruiseCritic admins assisted Royal Caribbean in choosing the fifty, with one of the stipulations being quantity of posts, “with many having over 10,000 message board posts on various Royal Caribbean topics.” From here, the hole just gets deeper.
Now that many RC fans feel slighted at not having made the ranks and most everyone else is disgusted at the covert trade of cruising for happy juicing, the trustworthiness of such forums is under fire.
Due to CruiseCritic’s ownership by TripAdvisor, which is in turn under the Expedia blanket of travel sites, a viral marketing stunt gone awry could possibly continue to negatively ripple. Does news like this affect your ability to trust good reviews on travel sites, or do you already consider yourself an excellent shill-spotter enough to weed out the solicited from the unsolicited? While this whole ordeal is mired in serious muckety-muck, let’s hope it serves as a lesson for future viral marketers and as an argument for transparency.

The ‘how do I get in on this’ is more or less tongue in cheek