By Julian Ashworth · Editor-in-Chief, London · September 2026
Holiday Home Times publishes a masthead of twenty-three editors, correspondents and contributors. Of the 985 articles currently serving on this site, 841 carry no author’s name at all. That is eighty-five per cent of what we publish, and 711 of those pieces predate 2015.
A reader who arrives at one of them and then visits our team page is entitled to ask which of those two things is true. This note is an attempt to answer that honestly, and to say what we are doing about it.
How it happened
This publication began in 2010 as a syndicated column and grew into an archive across five continents. Much of the early work was published under the masthead rather than under individual names, some of it was commissioned from contributors whose records did not survive successive platform migrations, and some of it was simply published without anyone insisting on a byline.
None of that is unusual for a publication of this age. It is also not a defence. An unsigned article asks a reader to trust an institution without telling them who did the work, and the older the piece, the more that matters — because the reader has no way of knowing whether anyone still stands behind it.
What we found when we looked
Over the past week we reviewed the most-read unsigned pages on this site. What we found was worse than staleness, and it is worth setting out plainly:
- Our guide to Karnataka homestay rules told owners they were exempt from luxury tax. Luxury tax on accommodation ceased to exist in 2017.
- Our guide to buying land in Himachal Pradesh never mentioned that land not put to its permitted use within two years vests back in the State.
- Our Bahamas pages described a graduated conveyance duty with relief that applies only to Bahamians. A foreign buyer pays ten per cent, flat.
- Our Gibraltar page explained Category 2 status at length without ever printing what it costs.
- Our Malta guide was advertising an investor-citizenship route that the European Court of Justice ruled unlawful in April 2025.
What we are changing
Four commitments, in the order we will be judged on them.
Every new piece carries a name. No exceptions, including short notices and market updates.
Rewritten pieces are signed by the journalist who rewrote them, with a line recording the original reporting and its date. Where a piece rests on original work — the Karnataka guide is built on a 2012 telephone interview with a named official at the state tourism department — that reporting is preserved on the page and dated, not quietly absorbed. We are updating our own journalism, not erasing it.
We attribute oldest-highest-traffic first. The pages doing the most work for readers get a name and a review before the ones nobody reads.
What we cannot stand behind comes down rather than sits there unsigned. Where a page cannot be verified and is not worth the effort of verifying, the honest answer is to remove it from the index rather than leave it earning attention it has not merited.
And what we will tell you when we are unsure
A change of practice that matters as much as the byline: where we cannot confirm a figure, we now say so on the page rather than reaching for a plausible number.
The Karnataka guide says the 2025 guidelines fix no registration fee and tells owners to confirm it with their district office. The Himachal guide says no public data exists on section 118 approval rates and names an RTI request as the route to one. Our new Tamil Nadu guide declines to print a registration fee at all, because the figures circulating online appear to be commercial filing agents’ service charges rather than government ones.
We would rather publish a gap we have marked than a number we have guessed. A guessed number is how a reader ends up planning around a tax that was abolished eight years ago.
One thing we found in our own mirror
While auditing the masthead we found that two pairs of our journalists had near-identical names, and that this page and our about page gave six of the same people different beats and different cities. Both are now fixed, and the two pages read from a single record.
It is a small thing beside eight hundred unsigned articles. But a reader checking whether a masthead is real notices it first, and we were asking them to take our word for rather a lot.
If you find one
If you are reading something on this site that is wrong, out of date, or asks you to act on a figure we have not sourced, tell us. Corrections reach me through the masthead. We will fix it, date the fix, and say what was wrong — as we have done on each of the pages linked above.
Eight hundred and forty-one articles is a long job. It starts with the ones you are most likely to read.