Hospitality trade journalists have a unique perspective on travel because we know communicating information about hotels and destinations is crucial. If people don’t know about your property, after all, they won’t come. That’s why press trips, or fam (for familiarization) trips, are essential: They spread the word. The good ones are great, the bad ones, nightmarish. I’d like to reduce the second type.
The components
Press trips bubble up when a public relations agency for a hospitality client, tourist board or convention-and-visitors bureau invites an editor and/or writer to publicize a new hotel, a significantly updated or reconstituted hotel, the debut of a prototype or a destination. Sometimes, a hotel is such a standalone or so isolated that locale doesn’t matter. But all properties are located somewhere, and the more important the destination, the more issues a press trip prompts.
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Carlo Wolff
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If the journalist is assigned to the trip or chooses to attend it on his or her own—and this is speculation—the PR agency makes the necessary travel arrangements and works with the property/hotel company/management firm to devise a schedule for each day of the trip. It’s at that point that a disconnect kicks in.
It seems that on most such trips, the PR agency does fine until arrival, when the focus of the trip (A.K.A. the hotel) takes over. That often means after the obligatory and essential tour of the hotel—tailored, hopefully, to diverse journalistic outlets with varied needs and interests—hotel management takes responsibility for the schedule, often in collaboration with a tourist board or a CVB.
Sales and marketing apparently then concoct a schedule that, lacking input from property officials and the journalists themselves, can lead to days so long and so jammed with peripheral activity there’s no chance for a reporter/editor to experience either the hotel or the area. For example, when a hotel defers to a tourist board or CVB, a bus trip may result in which the journalist is trapped and can’t leave the vehicle to walk around a place, even for an hour. That means no sense of the place, let alone its color or atmosphere, can come through. A slide show would be similarly numbing. Why these local organizations give such short shrift to where they are based is bewildering. The only reason I can think of is time constraints—which these entities create in self-fulfilling, self-defeating prophecy.
Breaking it down
I don’t work for a PR agency, hotel or tourist board, so I’m not privy to the press trip arrangements such organizations concoct. I imagine they’re complex, particularly when they involve different kinds of journalists, more than one language and questions of cuisine. They have to reach some kind of consensus in an effort to mount the best possible, most generally satisfying trip they can. They also have to take into account the locale—where the roads can be daunting, the weather oppressive, the language foreign and the cuisine intimidating or inadequate—and the interests of the journalists.
Most such trips allow down time, an hour or two journalists can use to recharge, get over jet lag, even sleep. But often, these are sandwiched between such activities as visits to nearby herb farms, vineyards or museums (which can be pleasant but aren’t clearly linked to the property itself) and, say, spa treatments, which seem doubly relaxing after a strenuous day. But it’s all too rare that organizers build free time into such a trip—time in which participants can stop and smell the roses, discover a neighborhood, try local cuisine—on their own. People who set up such trips often treat journalists as children incapable of independent activity and observation. That’s insulting, not to mention wearying.
I’m sure a lot of thought goes into which journalists to invite and for what purpose, and that’s good. But I suspect that in many cases, activities not specifically tied to the property itself attest primarily to the clout of interests that persuade the tourist board or CVB to add them to the schedule, irrelevance notwithstanding.
I like such trips because they expose me to new places. I’m interested in local culture, customs, how an area works and attractions, including those off the beaten track. Public relations agencies that coordinate such trips should ask the journalists they invite what they’re interested in ahead of time. The agencies should use such input to prepare on-site schedules—that the agencies should control—to meet those needs. That way, we can be in this together, raising the odds for fair and positive coverage. The bottom line is: Trips shouldn’t be over-engineered. And don’t forget to build in free time.
The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the opinions of HotelNewsNow.com or its parent company, Smith Travel Research and its affiliated companies. Columnists published on this site are given the freedom to express views that may be controversial, but our goal is to provoke thought and constructive discussion within our reader community. Please feel free to comment or contact an editor with any questions or concerns.
