Public relations in the travel and tourism industry has never been more competitive, more fragmented, or more interesting. The brands doing it well right now aren’t necessarily the biggest ones — they’re the ones that understand how people actually decide where to go, who to trust, and what story they want to tell when they get home.
This is a deep dive into where travel PR stands, what’s changing, and what separates campaigns that generate genuine interest from ones that generate press releases nobody reads.
The Booking Decision Is Longer and Stranger Than Brands Think
Most travel PR is still built around a fairly linear model: inspire, inform, convert. A beautiful campaign in January nudges someone into booking a summer holiday by March.
That model is increasingly out of step with how bookings actually happen.
Research from Expedia’s 2024 traveller behaviour study found that the average leisure traveller visits over 140 digital touchpoints — searches, review sites, social content, articles — before making a booking. That process spans weeks, sometimes months. It’s not a funnel. It’s more like a long, distracted loop where a person gets excited, goes cold, gets re-excited by a friend’s Instagram post, forgets about it, then books at 11pm on a Thursday because a price looked right.
What this means for PR is that a single campaign burst, however well executed, rarely does the work alone. The brands holding attention throughout that extended decision process are the ones earning bookings.
Why Travel PR Is Harder Than Most Sectors
PR for a consumer product is relatively contained. You have a thing, you explain why the thing is good, journalists and influencers help you spread that message.
Travel is trickier because you’re selling an experience that doesn’t exist yet for the person buying it. The gap between what’s promised and what’s delivered is where trust gets made or broken — and the internet has an extremely long memory for the broken version.
TripAdvisor, Google Reviews, and platforms like Trustpilot have given travellers a level of due-diligence capability that simply didn’t exist fifteen years ago. An airline can run the most beautiful brand campaign imaginable, but if the first Google result for their name is a thread about lost luggage and three-hour hold times, that campaign is doing uphill work.
This cuts both ways, though. Brands with genuinely strong reputations have an enormous earned media advantage. When a hotel consistently delivers, every guest becomes a potential PR asset. That word-of-mouth flywheel is worth more than most paid campaigns, and smart PR strategy is built around accelerating it.
The Media Landscape for Travel Has Fractured — and That’s Not All Bad
The traditional model of travel PR leaned heavily on travel desks at national newspapers and glossy magazines. That world still exists, but it’s thinner than it was. Many travel supplements have been cut back or moved online. The number of full-time travel journalists at legacy publications has shrunk considerably.
What’s grown in its place is harder to manage but arguably more interesting for brands with something genuinely worth talking about.
There are now thousands of travel-specific content creators operating on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Substack with highly engaged, niche audiences. A travel creator focused on solo female travel in Southeast Asia might have 400,000 followers who trust her recommendations more than anything they’d read in a Sunday supplement. A couple documenting van life across Europe can drive more enquiries to a campsite than a feature in a national paper.
The challenge is that the traditional PR disciplines — building journalist relationships, pitching exclusive stories, managing press trips — only partially translate to this new landscape. Creators operate differently. They care about their audience’s trust more than any single brand’s agenda. They won’t publish something that feels forced or inauthentic because their audience will tell them immediately.
That’s not a problem. It’s actually a reasonable filter for whether your pitch has merit.
What the Data Says About How Travellers Discover Destinations
Several studies from 2023 and 2024 offer consistent signals.
Social media has become the primary discovery channel for travellers under 40. A 2023 report from Sojern found that 45% of Millennial travellers said social media was their first point of inspiration for a trip, ahead of word of mouth, search engines, and traditional media. For Gen Z the figure was higher.
This isn’t purely about influencer campaigns. Organic content — a friend posting sunset photos from a lesser-known Greek island, a chef sharing a video of a market in Oaxaca — does as much or more to drive destination interest as paid promotion. The implication for tourism boards and destination management organisations (DMOs) is that building a destination’s organic social presence, and making it easy for travellers to find and use good imagery, is PR work just as much as pitching journalists is.
Search behaviour tells a parallel story. Google’s 2024 Travel Trends data shows that holiday-related searches are becoming more specific and more intentional. People aren’t just searching “holidays in Italy” — they’re searching “quiet villages in Sicily with good hiking” or “family-friendly hotels in Lisbon with a pool.” The long-tail has gotten longer. Brands and destinations that produce genuinely useful content targeting these specific queries get organic visibility that sustains itself far longer than any single campaign.
Press Trips: Still Valuable, Often Done Wrong
The press trip — bringing journalists, bloggers, or creators to experience a destination or property — remains one of the most effective tools in travel PR. A well-executed trip creates content that would cost a fortune to produce any other way. But a lot of press trips are still done in a way that produces exactly the kind of coverage they deserve: generic, forgettable, and indistinguishable from every other piece about the same place.
The problem is usually one of two things.
First, overscheduling. Packing fifteen activities into three days leaves no time for serendipity — the things that actually make for interesting writing. The best travel stories come from wandering slightly off the agenda, from the conversation with a local that wasn’t on the itinerary, from the bar nobody planned to go to. When every hour is accounted for, that doesn’t happen.
Second, inviting the wrong people. There’s a temptation to go for the biggest numbers — the influencer with the most followers, the journalist with the widest reach. Sometimes that’s the right call, but audience fit matters more than audience size. A travel creator whose followers are budget backpackers is not the right person to showcase a five-star property, regardless of how many followers they have.
The press trips that generate genuinely outstanding coverage tend to be small, curated, and deliberately loose on structure. They give people space to actually experience the place rather than just photograph it.
Crisis PR in Travel: A Sector That Gets Tested More Than Most
No sector faces crisis situations more regularly than travel and tourism. Natural disasters, political instability, pandemics, aviation accidents, resort incidents, data breaches — the list of things that can go wrong is long, and when they do, the public and media response moves fast.
The brands that navigate crises well share a few characteristics. They communicate early, before the story is fully formed, even when they don’t have all the answers. They avoid the temptation to minimise or deflect. They put a human voice front and centre rather than issuing corporate statements that read like they were drafted by a legal team (even if they were).
The brands that handle it badly almost always make the same mistake: they go quiet while the story fills the vacuum without them.
Ryanair is an interesting case study in what might be called confrontational crisis communications — an approach that most brands couldn’t get away with, but that works partly because it fits their no-frills, no-nonsense brand identity. When they’re criticised, they often push back publicly and bluntly. Most travel brands would be better served by a more empathetic approach, but the Ryanair example illustrates that consistency of voice matters. Whatever approach you take, it should feel like the same company that wrote your holiday campaigns.
Sustainability: The Story That Won’t Go Away
Every travel brand is now expected to have something to say about sustainability. The problem is that a lot of what gets said is unconvincing.
Terms like “eco-friendly,” “responsible travel,” and “green tourism” have been diluted to near meaninglessness through overuse. Travellers — particularly younger ones — have developed a reasonably sharp sense for when sustainability claims are substantive and when they’re decoration. The practice has a name: greenwashing. And it generates its own kind of negative PR when it gets called out.
The brands making sustainability work as a genuine PR asset are the ones doing it in specific, verifiable ways. A hotel that has eliminated single-use plastics, sources ingredients from named local farms, and publishes an annual environmental report has something to talk about. A hotel that says it’s “committed to a greener future” does not.
More interestingly, there’s growing evidence that authentic sustainability credentials drive bookings rather than just good press. A 2023 survey by Booking.com found that 76% of travellers intended to travel more sustainably over the next year. Whether intention translates to behaviour is a different question, but the direction of travel is clear enough that brands ignoring it are taking a risk.
The Local Angle Is Underused
One of the most consistent patterns in travel PR is the tendency to default to the broad and the obvious. The great national parks. The world-famous museums. The coastlines everyone’s already seen a thousand times.
There’s a reason destination PR gravitates there — those assets are real and they work. But the more crowded a destination’s narrative becomes, the harder it is to find angles that feel fresh. And the more overtourism becomes a genuine issue (Venice, Dubrovnik, Barcelona, Kyoto — all have struggled with it), the harder it is for destination PR to avoid the obvious tension between driving more visitors and managing the impact of the ones already there.
The local angle offers a different path. Lesser-known regions, emerging destinations, off-season travel, and hyper-local experiences all generate genuine interest precisely because they’re not the same story everyone’s already told. A story about a small island group in the Outer Hebrides or a wine region in northern Portugal that nobody outside Portugal has heard of stands a better chance of getting picked up by a features editor than another piece about Tuscany — because editors, like everyone else, are looking for something they haven’t seen before.
This requires more work from PR teams. It’s harder to sell. But the coverage it generates tends to be richer and more sustained.
AI in Travel PR: Useful Tool, Not a Strategy
The arrival of AI tools has changed the volume equation in PR. Generating press releases, writing destination copy, drafting pitch emails — all of this can be done faster now. That’s a genuine efficiency gain.
But it’s created a new problem: the volume of generic, AI-generated content hitting journalists’ and editors’ inboxes has gone up sharply, which means the signal-to-noise ratio has gotten worse. The value of a well-written, genuinely interesting pitch that clearly comes from a human who has actually been to the place and has something specific to say has probably gone up as a result.
AI is useful for research, for identifying patterns in search behaviour, for personalising communications at scale, and for handling the administrative side of media relations. The judgment about what’s interesting, what angle will land with a particular publication, and what story is worth telling in the first place — that’s still a human call. And getting it wrong at scale is worse than getting it wrong slowly.
What Good Travel PR Actually Looks Like
Strip away the jargon and the frameworks and the best practices lists, and the travel brands running effective PR campaigns are usually doing something fairly simple: they’ve found a story that’s genuinely interesting to people who don’t work for the brand, and they’ve found credible ways to tell it.
That sounds obvious. It isn’t easy. It requires being honest about what’s actually worth talking about versus what the brand wants to talk about — two things that frequently don’t overlap.
It requires relationships with journalists and creators built over time, not activated only when there’s something to promote. It requires a willingness to give up some control over how the story gets told, because the most trusted voices in travel are the ones who speak independently.
And it requires patience, because the kind of reputation that generates sustained bookings and genuine loyalty is built over years, not campaigns.
The destinations and travel brands that have earned deep, lasting affection from travellers — New Zealand, Japan, boutique hotel groups with devoted followings, airlines with genuine cult status among frequent flyers — have all done it the same way. Not through any single brilliant campaign, but through consistently delivering something worth talking about and making it easy for people to talk about it.
That’s the long game. And in travel PR, the long game is the only one worth playing.
