How do you actually claim a payment? I think I have over the £15 now and I generally don't like to let things build up for too long - not good for the site either to carry too much liabilities into another year.

OK I'll reveal my own experience.
I signed up, at Sascha's suggestion, on August 7th 2006.
In the August / September accounting period I made £55.55
In the October / November accounting period I made £180.88

I requested payout of the £55.55 on 14/10/06 and payout of the £180.88 on 8/12/06. To date I have not received anything. This is certainly slower than CIAO and a lot slower than dooyoo. I am aware that we in the UK are supposed to be paid through a Paypal account - whereas the continentals can have a direct debit transfer. I presume I will get paid sooner or later.

BTW: The level doesn't make any difference to earnings. The points threshold for moving from level 5 to level 6 is 250,000 - and I passed that over a month ago. You need to complete other criteria as well. I'm now at nearly 462,000 but still need to confirm another dozen external reviews submitted by other members. The trouble is there is such a feeding frenzy, particularly from the trivago.de members whenever a UK member submits one of these that you really have to sit watching the admin page the whole time to catch one. Same applies to photographs. As far as I'm concerned that just isn't worth the time.

Cheers Alan

It's a lot of money but you worked ridiculously hard for it - we assumed you'd been taking speed just to stay awake all night and grab all the approvals!

Seriously though, if you are willing to work at it there is money to be made but it's not the most 'creative' of sites - there's a lot of plodding admin and taking it on the chin when someone who barely understands English rates down something you've done that they couldn't possibly understand ;-)

I like it and it passes the time and gives me somewhere to post lots of photos but it's very time consuming and I miss the buzz of the peer ratings in Ciao and dooyoo. Like you I also find it frustrating that we don't seem to be able to review airlines on a travel site and it's also annoying to not be able to write a review of a city, country, region without having to spend 3 months pulling it all together.

Further to the comments above, I wonder if anyone on .co.uk has managed to receive a payment from trivago via Paypal yet? If so I would be interested in what you did. As far as I am aware I entered my details correctly as requested (although the confusing partial German screens aren't very helpful). I am still waiting for payment of the August/September period - it remains noted as requested on October 14th 2006 - as well as the more recent one (the two payments together are well over £200). I have raised my concerns on the system but cannot get any word of advice or encouragement from administration.

If and when - and as soon as - anything does come my way, I'll note it here.

Alan

I haven't requested payment yet but I would agree wholeheartedly that if you don't speak German it's not easy to do a lot of things on trivago. I wanted to have a go in their discussion area but couldn't work out how to register. And often if you want to do anything a bit unusual you face a load of German forms.

Thanks Sascha - I know that everything is there if I can only be bothered to look for it. But it's not always intuitive.

I just tried to set up my paypal details and the instructinons from Sascha (above) don't work - there is currently no form to put the details in to. Has anyone else done it and made it work yet?

I joined in early November. In less than 2 months without much effort I have accrued nearly £2.00. Hopefully I will achieve the £15 in 6 months as I have now gone up to the next level. It is certainly different to Ciao, and rating isn't available to lower down the levels, which is strange, but although I find it quite hard I think I'm getting somewhere, and I do love holidays and hotels etc!

Just to say that I received a message from Paypal today to let me know that a payment had been arranged from trivago. So the system does work.
Cheers - Alan

I'm glad to hear that you finally received your money!

Good news Sascha - the problem with the link to the page where you can put in paypal details is solved. So I've sent my paypal email address (so Trivago can empty my account of all my ebay earnings!) BUT what else am I supposed to do? Is just sending the address enough of is there another page hidden away somewhere where I have to make a formal request?

OK, I'm off to try that now. Thanks Sascha.