Travel link building. We cap it by destination, and we stop selling a season before it opens.
Two constraints, both published. One client per destination per season, with the taken list below. And a slot count per booking window that runs out, after which we stop selling for that season even to people already paying us. Everything else on this page follows from those two, including the work we turn down.
When a window's slots are gone we stop selling into it, including to clients already with us.
One property per destination, and a slot count per season
A destination guide has a finite number of entries. So does the shortlist a traveller reads. Take two hotels in the same city and the second one is buying whatever the first did not take, from the same publications, at the same price, while paying as though the list were still open.
We do not do that. One client per destination per season, written into the engagement.
The taken list is published below and dated. If your destination is gone you see it before you contact us. We will also tell you who else we would recommend.
The geographic unit is published too, because this is where these promises usually go quietly wrong. Barcelona is obvious. Barcelona and Sitges is not, and neither is Lake Como across three towns, or "the Cotswolds". Our boundaries are stated so you can check whether yours is the one we mean.
Why the windows are counted separately
We hold a fixed number of pitch slots per booking window and publish how many remain, with the date they were last counted. Long-haul and package, ski, city break, event-driven and shoulder demand all run on completely different curves, so one number across all of them would be wrong for most readers. When a window's slots are gone we stop selling into it, including to clients already with us.
Nothing is taken yet in most windows. Rather than pad the table, we publish it empty until it is not, and the slot counts below are the number that matters in the meantime.
If your window opens inside the payback period, you are buying next season
This is the one that costs us most, so it is worth being plain about it.
Authority takes months to register. A campaign starting now cannot move bookings for a window that opens inside that period, whatever anybody sells you. A property arriving in April for a July season is not buying this July. It is buying next July, and it should know that before it signs, not in September.
So we say no to those, in the months when demand and budget are both at their highest. That concentrates our own revenue into the off-season, which is exactly why almost nobody does it, and it is the reason to believe the rest of this page.
A refusal without an alternative is posturing. Existing guides and roundups get refreshed on a known cycle, and an entry added to a page that already ranks starts working faster than a new placement does. It is also the weaker route: you inherit somebody else's position instead of helping build it, and the entry usually lands at the bottom of a list held for years. We will do it. We will not pretend it is the same thing.
More demand in a week you already sell out is worth almost nothing
Most seasonal marketing advice tells you to build early for peak. For a property running at ninety-five percent in August, incremental August demand does one thing, which is let you hold rate. That is worth something. It is not worth a campaign.
The demand worth buying sits in the gaps: shoulder weeks either side of your season, the midweek pattern that never fills, and the specific need dates your pace report has been flagging since last year.
So the scoping conversation starts with your pace data, not our calendar. We ask which weeks you already sell out and we decline to sell coverage for them. That shrinks what we can invoice you for, which is the point.
Your booking curve by segment, your need periods, plus your window opening dates in writing at kickoff. Without them the season clause in the pricing section is unenforceable, and the whole calendar becomes guesswork dressed as method. If your revenue team cannot share pace data with an outside supplier, say so early. It is a common and entirely reasonable constraint, and it changes what we can promise.
Annual guides, "best time to visit" content and destination shortlists get rewritten at predictable points. Pitching a month before a refresh beats pitching a month after it by a wide margin, and knowing a given publication's cycle is worth more than knowing a general rule about lead times. We track the cycles for the publications in your destinations.
We do not sell coverage for windows your pace report says you already fill. We will tell you which weeks we think are worth the spend, and it is often not the ones you came in asking about.
The link you want costs the publisher money
Open any large "best hotels in" list and check where the links go. Most of them point at an OTA or a metasearch site, carrying an affiliate tag.
That is how the page pays for itself. Which means a direct link to your property earns the publisher nothing, and the thing you are buying is the thing their business model is built to avoid.
This is not an editorial standards problem. It is a revenue conflict, and it explains most of what is strange about this category: why travel inventory costs more than it looks like it should, why so much of the market is directory farms, and why roundup inclusion so often arrives as a redirect or a sponsored-attributed link that passes nothing.
Earned and fee-bearing, marked apart
01Some placements cost nothing beyond the pitch. Some carry a publisher fee, and in travel that is more common than in most categories for the reason above. Each target is marked before you approve it and the two are priced differently, because they are different products. What we do not do is blend them into one number and let you assume.
Attributes reported, and not invoiced as links
02A cloaked, sponsored or nofollowed placement can still put you in front of somebody choosing a hotel, which is often worth having. It is not a link, and we do not bill it as one. Every placement carries its attribute in the report, and attributed placements are listed separately from the ones that pass equity.
We will not sell affiliate-list inclusion as a booking-page link
03Getting your property named on a big affiliate-monetised list is a real and useful thing. It is also, very often, a mention with the click routed to a marketplace. Where that is what a target will produce, we tell you before pitching, and it does not count toward your commercial-page share.
Check it in thirty seconds before you believe us. Open any large destination list and look at where the outbound links actually go. How we handle roundups →
Where product changes hands, three things follow
Hosted stays and press trips are the dominant currency of travel PR, and almost nobody selling links in this category will tell you what they cost or what they produce.
They are disclosed
Endorsement rules in the US and UK put the exposure on the advertiser, which is you. Any disclosure you supply goes in verbatim and we confirm it survived the publisher's editing.
The link usually carries an attribute
Search engines treat links from content produced in exchange for goods or services as requiring qualification. A hosted-stay review link should carry a sponsored or nofollow attribute, and where it does we report it and do not invoice it as a link.
They cost you in kind
Room nights, food and beverage, staff time. That is a real line in the campaign and we put it in the plan so it does not arrive later as a surprise.
A hosted stay can produce a bad review that ranks
And it can rank for your own property name. We will tell you which publications have written unfavourably about comparable properties before we pitch them. Some clients want that risk. It should be a decision, not an accident.
This describes our practice. It is not legal advice.
Four things we do not sell, including when you ask for them
Destination directory farms
The largest cheap inventory in travel, sold in bulk and read by nobody. Check one in a minute. Open it, count the outbound links on a single page, and look at whether any of them carry an attribute. There is no version of this worth your money, and it is usually what fills out a proposal priced impossibly low.
Travel blogs with no measurable readership
A site being about travel does not make it relevant to your destination. Nor does a domain rating tell you whether anybody reads the page you would appear on, which is why we check traffic on that specific URL. A general travel blog that has never covered your region does not clear it.
Reciprocal exchanges between property sites
Still unusually common in this category and still transparently a scheme. If another property proposes swapping links, that is a relationship worth having and a link worth declining. We will say so. We do not arrange them.
Review platform profiles
Tripadvisor, Google reviews and OTA profile pages are worth managing and they are not links. Those profiles carry attributes that pass no equity, and moving up them is reputation management, which is a different service we do not sell. They are not counted toward a deliverable here and we do not invoice for them.
The queries we will not chase, named in the contract
Some of what you would most like to rank for is not available, and an agency that takes your money without saying which parts is selling you a report you will not enjoy reading.
The bare transactional terms in most destinations are held end to end by marketplaces and metasearch. Above those, Google's own hotel and flight units are not organic results at all, so a share of that traffic has no organic prize attached regardless of how much authority you build.
The targets, and the exclusions: named query classes struck from scope, with the property that owns each one written next to it.
Those exclusions appear as rows in every monthly report. That is deliberate. It stops us quietly claiming credit later for movement on terms we told you at the start we would not pursue, and it means the report shows what was not attempted alongside what was.
The planning layer: destination guides, comparison and shortlist content, "best time to" and "where to stay in" formats, and the itinerary content a traveller reads weeks before they book anything.
A committed share on commercial pages, with a published test for what counts
Reporting which destination a link served constrains nothing, because we chose the destination. So the reporting is not the commitment. This is.
Before you sign we agree a minimum share of placements that must point at a destination, property, room-type or offer page instead of at your blog. It is written into the engagement, reported monthly against the actual figure, and the shortfall is either replaced or not invoiced.
That is a harder commitment in travel than in any other category we work in, for the reason in the supply section: the publisher has a financial reason to send that click somewhere else. Every commercial-page placement is a pitch fought against the page's own economics.
A placement counts for a destination when the page it sits on ranks in the top twenty for a query naming that destination, and when the link sits in body content rather than in a list of outbound partners. Apply it to any URL we deliver, without asking us.
Before any of that, ten minutes on your own site. List your destination and property pages. Pull referring domains per page, not for the domain. Now mark which pages have nothing pointing at them. Almost every travel brand finds the same shape: one market carries the profile and the rest are invisible, and the invisible ones are often the ones with capacity to fill.
The report, before you buy anything
One redacted report from live work. No form, no email address, no call booking.
Every column is in it, including the ones that make a month look worse. Take it to whoever you use now and ask for the same columns.
A sample proves the format, not the performance. It is one month of one engagement, and we chose it.
Five situations where we would tell you not to buy this
Links do not fix a booking engine, a contract clause or a paid search problem. Where the arithmetic cannot close for a reason outside our control, taking the work would be taking money to prove a point both of us could have checked first.
You cannot differentiate your direct rate
Parity terms in your OTA agreement may prevent you publishing a cheaper public direct price. If a traveller lands on your site and finds the same rate they saw on the marketplace, winning the click does not win the booking. Some form of member rate, inclusion or package differentiation has to exist. Check your own contract before you check our availability.
Your booking path is somewhere else
Many independents run booking on a third-party engine, often on a domain you do not control. If the entire conversion path sits off your site, authority has nowhere commercially useful to land beyond the content layer, and we would rather say that than sell around it. We can work with the content layer. It is a different, smaller campaign and it should be priced as one.
You have not funded metasearch
Google Hotel Ads and the metasearch platforms pay back materially faster than this does. If they are not funded, fund them first. We will still be here, the destinations will not have moved, and you will have a better sense of what organic needs to add. This costs us campaigns every year and we say it anyway.
You are buying against a window you already fill
If your pace report says the weeks you want help with already sell out, the honest answer is that the money belongs somewhere else, or against different weeks. We will tell you which weeks we think are worth the spend, and it is often not the ones you came in asking about.
You need references and insurance to start
Groups buying through procurement and destination marketing organisations working to public tender both need supplier references, contract history and insurance documentation before a conversation opens. We can supply the last of those. We cannot yet supply travel references, and pretending otherwise wastes a tender cycle for both of us.
Four of these five are reasons we lose revenue rather than reasons you lose a campaign. That is the test of whether a refusal list is real.
Destinations get disrupted and properties change hands
A destination can be taken off the table by something neither of us controls. A wildfire, unrest, a travel advisory, a route cut. Where a destination becomes unsellable mid-campaign, remaining capacity moves to another destination in your contract at no re-scoping fee, and we will tell you plainly whether billing pauses or continues.
Properties get sold, rebranded or change flag. When that happens the domain either dies or folds into a group template you do not control, and everything built points at a URL that no longer exists. The asset is domain-bound, not property-bound.
You get the full placement inventory whenever you ask for it, so a redirect map can cover it. And links that break because the domain changed are not re-placed free, which we would rather state now than argue about later.
We have no travel or hospitality client on the books
Somebody has to be first and it should be a decision made with the facts.
Our work has been in restricted categories and software. Cannabis, kratom and adjacent products, in markets where most publishers refuse the category outright and a brand cannot buy paid social or Google Ads.
So what we offer instead of a case study is the standard, published in full. The sample report. The refusal list. The capacity count with a date on it. The matching test you can apply to any URL we send you. Ask for all of it before you pay us anything.
Prospecting into thin supply, where most of the pool says no before you start. Negotiating with editors who screen by category. And a documented refusal practice, which is the thing this page is mostly made of. Regulated-category work →
Travel publisher relationships. Destination media contacts. Any experience of the hosted-stay circuit. Any DMO work at all. We are starting those from zero, and a first travel engagement will ramp more slowly than a campaign in a category we already work in. Expect it and hold us to it.
Six kinds of travel business, and the commission argument only applies to one
The buying process differs more than the tactics do. An owner-operator decides on a call. A group buys through procurement with an incumbent agency, brand guidelines that may forbid third-party-written content, and shared-domain property pages where per-property attribution is impossible. A DMO runs a formal tender. Tell us which you are at the first email.
The commission arithmetic, and why we will not lead with it
Every vendor in your stack has told you that a direct booking beats an OTA booking. It is true and it is not an argument, because commission is an acquisition cost with a billboard effect attached, and the direct channel has its own costs.
Brand paid search defended against OTA and metasearch bidders, booking engine fees, payment processing, member-rate discounting, and higher cancellation on flexible direct rates. Net delta sits materially below gross commission, and you know your own number better than any page does.
If your agreement stops you publishing a cheaper public direct rate, the organic click does not convert into the saving the payback assumes. A member rate, inclusion or package differentiation has to exist, and it needs somewhere to live on your site.
Shifting volume away from an OTA has a cost inside that channel, because their ranking rewards volume and conversion. Every book-direct pitch in the category ignores it. We would rather scope around it than pretend it does not exist.
Priced by how many destinations need covering
Four of the six pages we could read gate pricing entirely. We publish a floor instead, and lose the enquiries it turns away.
Travel carries no surcharge. Retainers are built from our published per-link rates — DR 40+ at $200, DR 50+ at $300, DR 60+ at $450, DR 70+ at $550 — the same rates as guest posting and blogger outreach. $1,500 is six placements (3 × DR 40+, 3 × DR 50+). $4,000 is twelve (2 × DR 40+, 6 × DR 50+, 4 × DR 60+). $10,000 is twenty-five (11 × DR 50+, 10 × DR 60+, 4 × DR 70+).
We invoice on live placement. Nothing before. And a placement bought for a season that publishes after that window opens is not invoiced, which is why we ask for your window dates in writing at kickoff.
Our floor is $1,500 a month. Below that we cannot buy enough destination-matched placements to move a page competing with marketplaces. Taking the money would be taking it for nothing.
If your budget is under it, this is the wrong purchase right now. Fund metasearch, fix the direct booking path, and get the destination page structure right. All three pay back faster. None of them is something we sell, which is why we can afford to say it.
Travel link building, answered
What is travel link building?
Earning editorial links to destination, property and travel content pages from publications travellers actually read. It differs from generic link building because relevance is geographic as well as topical, the work has to be dated against a booking window, and the publications you want links from are usually paid by the marketplaces you are competing with.
How far ahead should we start?
Far enough that authority registers before your window opens, which is longer than most people expect and varies by trip type. The more useful answer is that if your window opens inside the payback period, we will tell you to build for the next one instead. That conversation happens on the first call.
Will this win us direct bookings against the OTAs?
On the planning and comparison queries, often. On bare transactional terms, usually not. Those are named as exclusions in your contract. It also depends on something outside our control: if parity terms stop you offering anything different on your own site, winning the click will not win the booking.
Do you work with hotels, operators and DMOs?
Yes, and they get different campaigns, because they have almost nothing in common commercially. Note that DMOs and groups buying through procurement need supplier references we cannot yet provide in this sector. That is covered honestly in the experience section, not discovered during a tender.
How do you build authority for one destination?
By targeting publications that already rank for that destination instead of travel sites in general, and by holding ourselves to a published test for what counts as destination-matched. A link from a Lisbon guide does more for your Lisbon page than a stronger link from a general travel blog.
Do you use press trips and hosted stays?
Where they are part of the plan, and with three things stated up front: the placement is disclosed, the resulting link usually carries an attribute that stops it passing equity so we do not invoice it as a link, and the room nights and staff time are a real cost we put in the plan.
What about Tripadvisor and review sites?
Worth managing, and not links. Those profiles carry attributes that pass no equity, and improving your standing on them is reputation management, which is a separate discipline we do not sell. They are not counted toward your deliverable and they are not invoiced. If a proposal you are comparing includes them as links, ask what attribute they carry.
Do you work in other languages?
Travel demand is inbound, so a European property often needs German or US media as much as English. Multi-market campaigns run through our international service with native-language outreach. What we will not do is imply a language capability we do not staff.
What happens if the destination has a crisis?
Remaining capacity moves to another destination inside your contract at no re-scoping fee, and we tell you whether billing pauses or continues. It is written into the engagement and not negotiated during the emergency itself, which is the entire point of having a policy at all.
Have you worked in travel before?
No, and we would rather say so than let you find out in month three. Our background is in restricted categories where most publishers refuse the vertical outright. The prospecting discipline transfers. Travel publisher relationships do not, and a first engagement ramps more slowly.
Tell us your destinations and your booking windows
You get back which of your destination pages are underpowered against what outranks them, where competitors get their authority page by page, the query classes we would exclude and who owns each one, and whether your destination and season are still open. Yours to keep whether or not you hire us.
Which destination pages are underpowered, and against whom
Where competitors' authority comes from, page by page
The query classes we would exclude, and who owns each one
Whether your destination and season are still open