Well all I’ll say is that sponsoring great writers & photographers has worked for us offline and online in the past. In return we get SEO, quality links, cheaper CPC than with adwords – important with adwords CPCs arriving at the prohibitive level (Google wants to watch that) and in a world of falling airline RPKs/and slashed marketing budgets; and the much undervalued kudos by association – something I never read about anymore. Also avoids Coren/Brugge/Bainbridge cat-like issues involving undigested mice in the online kitchens if one has helped a wee bit in the creation of original content/recipe – an acceptable cat/mouse creative baguette as it were.

Whether there is enough volume of click throughs and subsequent bookings is a different matter as Mark alludes to. Maybe all you can hope for is a heavy flow of peoples RTW travelling juices in a Pavlovian manner through great writing.

Moreover another Brucey bonus is that we get to sponsor (is that the word – makes me feel like Gertude Stein/Erza Pound in a Parisian saloon in the 1920′s) great writers, like Mark Eveleigh, (and Jeremy Head in the past) and we trust them to get on with it. Win win methinks. Watch this space for 3 more sponsorships (they’re almost sorted) next year. Emerging but worth a shout I reckon, n’est-ce pas?

I also don’t think your examples are great. The kayak news feed – despite the UK domain – is a straight lift from its US site. The Bing travel blog is also US-facing, and judging by the plugs that the writers get for their companies I suspect they might be writing for free. And I guess you won’t be paying Mark Eveleigh to write a blog on your RTW site?