12 July 2009
Travel PR tips
On the one hand this may partly be because they don't always get what they want, and perhaps they aren't willing to recognise that they may sometimes simply not get what they want for very sound commercial reasons, such as that what they can offer is not what the destination (hotel, travel company, restaurant, etc.) actually needs. On the other hand PR incompetence is not rare.
Having sat on both sides of the desk (although I've never had anything to do with travel-related PR) perhaps I'm a little more sympathetic. I also remember many times that well-organised PRs have helped me put together trips that have resulted in stories that have been widely published, so all parties have benefited.
Needless to say, I also remember all the little slip-ups that have helped to make things unnecessarily difficult, simply because PR people have failed to do their jobs properly.
I then happened to come across the site 'Pro PR Tips', and the link above is to one tip that particularly caught my attention:
> It’s sad when a PR person makes me want to cover a company less. But it’s not my job to tell company execs when they’re getting screwed by their reps. Advice to CEOs and internal marketing people: Don’t cede your media relationships to your contractors.
The author writes about technology both in print and on-line, but what struck me is that there are individual hotels, hotel chains, and even whole countries that I won't deal with simply because their PR people are so bad.
One major Hong Kong hotel is disappearing from guide books I'm involved in simply because the PR person there tries to negotiate: 'I'll give you an extra night if you guarantee to say...'
'What?' you might cry. 'You mean you'd omit a brilliant hotel I might like simply because you don't like the PR person? I'm interested in the beds, the location, the price, the service, and I don't have to deal with the PR person. Why should you penalize me because the PR person is bad?'
And the answer is because anyway the problem in Hong Kong is never choosing what to put in, but what to leave out, because there are more excellent hotels than there is space. So no one's losing out here, but be assured that if there was little alternative, that hotel would be included anyway. The point I'm making is that here is an example of PR actually driving down a hotel's exposure to its prime target markets. Even if I were forced to include the property, it would never be mentioned in passing in articles, and I would be unlikely to recommend it on-line in other contexts. The PR person's behaviour is damaging that hotel's business. No names to be given here, but let's just say that fashion PR and travel PR are clearly quite different.
I will name the hotel chain I usually ignore, though. It's the Four Seasons. This is because in pursuit of guide book coverage for very widely distributed series indeed, I've twice dealt with properties in this chain and been treated in precisely the same way: My initial email request for access has been ignored until I was either already in the city in question or about to board the plane, and then I've received an invitation to lunch.
'So what,' perhaps you ask, 'is the problem?' Well perhaps, inspired by Pro PR Tips, I'll go on to explain in one of my own series of travel-PR-related tips. Watch this space.
The one country I ignore is because although I've visited it twice, and written about it extensively in Time, the National Post, and assorted local Canadian papers, and happen to like it very much both personally and professionally (entirely different things) my most recent encounters with its current PR people have involved considerable rudeness on their part.
Maybe the key person in question has moved on. But until the destination approaches me again, I'm never going to know. And it's a big world, with many destinations, and more invitations to travel than I can accept.
Since many of the PR people I deal with are in fact civil servants the situation is perhaps different from that of the tech industry, and it's that thought, plus the realisation that more than a decade of experience has left me with a cupboardful of (mostly) friendly advice to offer.
As I said above, watch this space.
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1 comment:
there are no tips in this article! I was hoping you were going to teach me something about good travel PR?
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