One of the quirkier new travel sites to appear on the web in recent months -
Hotel Haiku, where visitors get hotel property descriptions in, well,
Haiku.
For example, La Classe hotel in the Belgian town of Dinant has this text:
Less Holiday rental
More a design museum
An old school charm
The site is the brainchild of Garri Rayne, blogger and publisher of the Holidaypad and Go Glamping travel sites, using the Cargo platform for running content and pictures.
It is actually very simple. Each section has a picture, Haiku and link to the hotel's website. The idea is to create the "most original and concise hotel website ever", Rayner says.
"There are no ads and no affiliate marketing. There's no user generated content. No mash-ups. No Google maps (do we really need maps for these places? No!) It's not adorned with any social media fluff. And, more importantly, it's not just another WordPress cookie-cutter 'premium' theme."
Perhaps the oddest feature about the site is that it turned off at the end of each day. Yes, Hotel Haiku is open from 7.30am to 9.30pm GMT on most days, except Sunday.
"It's an attempt to annoy and scupper the content scrapers, copyists and AirBNB," Rayner says cheekily.
Straight talking, clearly.
The site probably has ambitions to be a huge money-spinner, then? No at all.
"In the current climate there's too much temptation to monetize the f**k out of everything that moves, but Hotel Haiku doesn't want to get hampered with a business model at this stage and, besides, it would kill all the fun! The business model, whatever it will be, needs to evolve."
So that's that, then.
In
the current climate there's too much temptation to monetize the f..k out of everything that moves,
but Hotel Haiku doesn't want to get hampered with a business model at this stage and besides,
it would kill all the fun! The business model, whatever it will be, needs to evo