There’s a piece of advice that gets handed to every journalism student, every PR graduate, and every communications intern on their first week: make sure you answer the 5 Ws. Who, What, When, Where, Why. Get those in, ideally early, and you’ve done the structural job.
It’s good advice. It’s also advice that an enormous number of press releases ignore — not because the writers haven’t heard of the 5 Ws, but because they’ve confused answering them with actually answering them. There’s a difference between technically including the information and presenting it in a way that makes a journalist want to do anything with it.
This piece is about what the 5 Ws mean in the context of a press release, where most releases go wrong with each one, and what it looks like when it’s done properly.
A Quick Note on Why Press Releases Still Matter
Before getting into the framework, it’s worth addressing the question that comes up whenever press releases are discussed: does anyone actually read these things?
Journalists get hundreds of press releases a week. Most are deleted within seconds. But that’s an argument for writing better press releases, not for abandoning them. A well-constructed release still does things nothing else quite does — it establishes the official record of an announcement, gives journalists the factual scaffolding they need to write quickly, and signals that an organisation is media-ready and knows how to communicate.
The 5 Ws are the scaffolding. Get them right and the release works. Get them wrong and it doesn’t matter how good the headline is.
WHO
The first W seems obvious. It’s the person, organisation, or entity the story is about. In practice, the “who” in press releases is where a lot of the padding lives.
Most releases open with the company name and a description that reads like a marketing brochure. “XYZ Travel Group, a leading provider of premium leisure experiences across Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, today announced…” The company knows it’s not actually a leading provider — or at least, it knows that every company says that, which makes the phrase meaningless. Journalists know it too.
The who needs to answer two questions: who is making this announcement, and why should the reader care who they are? If the organisation is well known, the first question answers itself. If it isn’t, you need to establish credibility quickly and specifically. Not “one of the UK’s fastest-growing boutique hotel groups” but “a group of twelve independent hotels across Scotland and the Lake District, collectively hosting around 40,000 guests a year.”
Specific numbers beat vague superlatives every time.
The who also includes the people being quoted. A press release quote from “a spokesperson” carries roughly zero weight. A quote from the company’s founder, head of sustainability, or the chef who designed the menu gives the release a human face and — crucially — gives a journalist someone to potentially follow up with. Named, real people make a release more credible and more useful.
WHAT
This is the announcement itself. What has happened, what is being launched, what has changed, what is being offered.
The single biggest problem with the “what” in travel and tourism press releases is that brands frequently announce things that aren’t actually news. A new menu at a restaurant that changes its menu four times a year. A “partnership” between two companies that amounts to a cross-promotional agreement with no material impact on customers. A hotel announcing it has “refreshed” two of its sixteen rooms.
Journalists know when something is news and when it isn’t. Sending a release about something that isn’t news doesn’t just get ignored — it trains the journalist to ignore the next release from the same sender before they’ve even opened it.
The what needs to be genuinely new, genuinely significant to the audience the journalist serves, or genuinely interesting in a way that goes beyond the company’s own interests. The test isn’t “does this matter to us?” It’s “does this matter to the people who read this publication?”
For travel PR specifically, the what tends to work when it connects to a wider story. A new direct flight route is news partly because of the route itself, but more because of what it means for travellers — easier access to a destination, lower fares, a new option for a particular type of trip. Frame the what around the consequence for the audience, not just the fact of the announcement.
WHEN
Timing is where press releases most visibly fall apart.
There’s an obvious version of the when: the date. When is the hotel opening? When does the new service launch? When are tickets available? This information needs to be clear, specific, and correct. Vague language like “coming soon” or “later this year” is useless to a journalist working to a features calendar.
But the when goes deeper than publication dates. It’s also about why this announcement is happening now. News has a timeliness dimension — it fits into a conversation that’s already happening, or it creates one. A sustainable travel initiative announced alongside a major UN climate report lands differently than the same announcement made on a quiet Tuesday in February. A new family travel product pitched ahead of the school summer booking window has a better chance of finding space than the same pitch in October.
Good travel PR teams think about the when the same way editors think about their forward features planning. They know which stories are going to be relevant in which months, they know when the major travel fairs and industry events land, and they work backwards from those dates rather than pitching when the product is ready and hoping for the best.
Embargo dates are also part of the when. Using embargoes correctly — giving journalists enough lead time to prepare coverage that goes live at the right moment — is a skill in itself. Setting an embargo too tight gives nobody time to do anything useful with the information. Setting it too loose risks leaks and creates the impression that the announcement isn’t that significant if the brand isn’t in any hurry to get it out.
WHERE
In travel PR, where does more work than in almost any other sector. The location of an announcement isn’t just logistical context — it’s often the entire point.
A new hotel opening needs its where communicated with enough precision and texture that a journalist can picture it and understand why it matters. “A new boutique hotel in Portugal” tells a journalist almost nothing useful. “A sixteen-room converted farmhouse in the Douro Valley, forty minutes from Porto, opening in May” tells them enough to know whether it fits their upcoming features on wine tourism, European city breaks, or small-group travel.
The where also matters in terms of media targeting. A regional tourism campaign in Scotland should be pitched differently to a travel editor in Glasgow, a features writer in London, and a travel blogger based in New York. The physical location of the story and the physical location of the audience are both part of the where, and treating them the same is how campaigns end up pitching the wrong angle to the wrong person.
There’s a subtler version of where that’s often missed in press releases: the digital where. Where can people find out more? Where can they book? Where can they see the imagery? A release that announces something compelling but buries the website URL in the footer, or sends a journalist to a landing page that takes three minutes to load and doesn’t have a booking function yet, has wasted the work that got them to click.
WHY
This is the one that most press releases get most wrong. And it’s the one that matters most.
The why is the reason this announcement exists — not the company’s reason for making it, but the reason a journalist’s readers should find it interesting. Those are not the same thing.
A hotel group might issue a release about its new wellness programme because the wellness offering has been developed over two years and the marketing team is proud of it. That’s the internal why. The external why — the one that earns coverage — is something else. Maybe it’s tapping into a documented rise in people booking holidays specifically to recover from burnout. Maybe it’s a programme developed with an NHS consultant that makes specific, verifiable claims about outcomes. Maybe it’s the first wellness facility of its kind in that region. The why needs to exist outside the brand’s own narrative.
This is also where the 5 Ws framework gets extended by some practitioners to include a sixth element: HOW. How does this work? How is it different from what already exists? How does a customer access it? The how is the detail that turns an announcement into something a journalist can actually write about — it provides the texture and specificity that separates interesting from generic.
Putting It Together: The Inverted Pyramid
The 5 Ws don’t need to appear in order, but they do need to appear early. The classic structure of press release writing is the inverted pyramid: the most important information first, supporting detail after.
This is the opposite of how most corporate announcements are written. Those tend to build to the point, saving the headline news for after three paragraphs of company background. Editors are busy. If the point isn’t clear in the first two sentences, the release gets deleted before the third paragraph exists for them.
A strong press release lead answers as many of the 5 Ws as possible in a single sentence — ideally one short enough to quote directly. “A Scottish island hotel has announced it is closing to individual guests entirely and opening exclusively for whole-island hire, available from April, to meet growing demand for private group retreats.” That’s who, what, when, why, and where in thirty-five words. A journalist knows exactly what they’re dealing with and can decide in seconds whether it fits their next issue.
The Test Worth Running on Every Release
Before you even consider press release distribution, it’s worth asking a simple question: if a journalist received this from a brand they’ve never heard of, would they understand within ten seconds what the story is, why it’s relevant to their readers, and what they’d need to do to take it further?
If the answer is no — if the who is vague, the what is unclear, the when is unspecified, the where is underexplained, or the why is missing entirely — the release isn’t ready.
The 5 Ws aren’t a checklist to tick off. They’re a test of whether the announcement is actually ready to face the world.
