Holiday Pad

So come on, consider rebooting Holiday Pad. Because we have deliberately shunned
most forms of monetization, is it too much of a challenge for you? ;-)

Garri,
How the f**k am I supposed to answer this question: Do we even need to monetize it??

Should I jump inside your head and figure out what you want? Cmon.

Garri, you don't want to monetize, as you've said several times, but you want a redesign/ reboot. Very tall order for us. What's more, the reboot is for blogs, which Holiday (while admittedly cool) does not resemble.

Well, that question was provocative.

Raj: never said I didn't want to monetize it, just didn't want to monetize it in the same old tired and w@nky way as almost every other WP using mofo on the planet.

Keep your eyes peeled for some changes to our non-blog ;-)

We'll reboot the f..ker ourselves!

Honestly, i really like the look of holiday pad. You can monetize with classifieds, no? I mean luxury classifieds.

... behind the scenes we're working on our own ad system which will pull in ads to various areas of HP. It's fairly radical in its approach but yes, they are effectively classifieds.

Believe it or not, we've had real trouble persuading people who've been featured on HP to link to us from their site. We need to think of ways to solve this problem.

At this stage in the game I would be much happier with accommodation providers who've been featured to link to us e.g. 'as featured on Holiday Pad', than I would with income (at this stage). This is the area in which we need to be more creative and there's some ideas on the table.

That's a shame. It's odd that that's the case, though if they're not bloggers, they may be thinking that linking harms their website's PR, give the discussions about big G's link farm crackdowns. I mean, they're wrong if that's what they're thinking, but that's a tough one.

So, what you need Garri is a blog about luxury travel and accomodations. If you already have one, it's not obvious - which will be a problem for others, too.

Things to touch upon:

(1) Where to find accomodations (your site, of course)
(2) Rates by country
(3) Local laws about use of such places - allowed duration of stay, etc.
(4) Can you work while you're in such and such country
(5) Local sights to check out while there
(6) Cuisine of the region, and some places to check out - even if it's a quick summary of something from a food blog - make sure you give link love.
(7) How to slash your airfare
(8) Can you write off the stay [American and European perspective]

That's a starting point. Hopefully I'm not telling you want you already know.

What I'd suggest is that you setup the blog in a subdirectory, but use Feedburner BuzzBoost to show a snippet of the RSS feed of the blog on the home page.

It's not a full-blown reboot, but merely some content suggestions.