It's more difficult to win in #affable as whole Steemit can participate in it. Sure, the rewards are much bigger too, but still, it's very time-consuming, especially if we want to make a good comment related to the published content.

#travelers-say is much smaller, limited to our community, so it's relatively easy. Last week we had in total 58 comments with that hashtag. Maybe the rewards are not as impressive as with #affable, but many users are commenting posts of others anyway, so adding the tag is not much extra work to do :)

PS: 13 000 comments? Wow! Kudos!