I have a dilemma and I need some help.

I have a website http://www.travelsenseindia.com that provide custom made trips to India. For the blog for this website we’re not able to decide to go with a subdomain(blog.travelsenseindia.com) or a new domain(www.theindianmile.com) altogether? The blog will be featured in the website, the website is where people get in touch with our company and the blog is where they will get all info to make a decision about the tours.

I clearly understand the benefits of having the website and blog on the same hosting and the biggest of them being SEO, but the reason why we are tempted to make it a different domain (www.theindainmile.com) is because we want to keep it away from any sales messages. The idea is to run a blog with valuable, useful and practical travel advice for India for Free with no strings attached or sales pitch. 

In this sense we find it better to have a different domain as we dont want it to have a shared identity with a travel company, which is an automatic underlying sales message. Also we want to create a separate identity for the blog. Of course we want to benefit the travel business from the blog, but not until we reach a certain no of subscribers the visitor to subscriber to fan to client transition is achieved. 

So largely the question here is should we go for sub-domain as blog for better SEO or with a new domain altogether with a better identity??

Any inputs will be greatly appreciated

So as a consumer I find having the blog on the actual website easy for me…I dont like having to do extra work to get to a website.

If I have read a blog that is giving me great how to’s and tips and after reading that blog realize that they have additional pages on thier website I will look to see what they are all about, and if it is a product I want, it makes it easier for me to buy.

That is just my opinion though…i’m very new to blogging and am taking the “what would I as a consumer want to see” approch vs. a marketing person…plus on the writters side of it, why would you want to make all that extra work having to do double the work for the SEO?