Seen. Everywhere.

Digital PR for travel brands, coverage where the trip is decided

A trip to this country is usually decided in another one, which means the coverage that matters is rarely local. Digital PR for a travel brand is the work of getting into the round-ups, the guides and the travel media that a traveller in your source market reads months before they book anything at all.

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See which guides and round-ups your competitors appear in and you do not, how much of your existing coverage is in the markets your travellers come from, and what a story from your brand could be. Send us a few details and our team will put together a free, no obligation audit.

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    Why a specialist

    Travel digital PR is not generalist digital PR

    Digital PR for a travel brand is media relations pointed at the places that decide where people go: the destination round-ups, the travel sections, the where to go next lists, the specialist operator and hotel coverage and the awards. It earns three things at once, which are the mention a traveller reads, the authority link behind it and the corroboration an AI assistant leans on when it is asked to plan a trip. It is one of the disciplines on our digital PR offer, run for the brands in our travel work.

    The thing that separates it from a generalist programme is geography. Because the UAE is a stopover and connection market and a trip here is planned from somewhere else, the titles worth being in are frequently in another country, written for another audience and working to a commissioning calendar set by that market’s travel season rather than ours. Pitching a UAE winter angle to a European desk in December is far too late, and that timing problem is most of the job.

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    How the work runs

    Find the real angle, then pitch to the right market

    We start with the source markets, because there is no point producing a brilliant angle for an audience that was never going to come here, and the markets your travellers actually arrive from decide which desks matter. Then the angle itself, which has to be genuinely new or genuinely useful to a story about a place rather than an announcement about a brand. Then the timing, which in travel is the part most often got wrong, since a desk commissions a winter destination piece long before the winter.

    Everything is checked before it is pitched, because a travel journalist will verify a detail and a brand that gets one wrong does not get a second look. Talk to our team about which guides your competitors are in and you are not.

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    Questions

    Travel digital PR, answered

    What is travel digital PR?

    The practice of earning coverage and authoritative links for an operator, hotel, agency or attraction through stories travel desks actually want, which means angles about a place or a way of travelling rather than about your business.

    It earns the mention a traveller reads, the authority link behind it and the corroboration an assistant uses when it plans a trip. Those three arrive together or not at all.

    Why does the coverage need to be in other countries?

    Because that is where the decision happens, since the UAE is a stopover and connection market and a great many trips here are chosen by somebody sitting in another country reading publications aimed at that country rather than this one.

    Local coverage still has a job, particularly for the outbound side of the business. It just should not be the whole programme.

    How far ahead do travel desks work?

    Further ahead than almost any other section, because destination and seasonal features are commissioned months before they publish, so a winter angle offered in winter has missed the commissioning window entirely.

    That timing problem is most of the discipline. It is why travel PR is planned as a year of angles rather than reacted to.

    What kind of stories actually work for a travel brand?

    New routes and openings, genuine first hand knowledge of a place that a desk cannot get elsewhere, a shift in how people are travelling, and data that says something a reader did not already assume.

    What does not work is a repackaged brochure. Travel desks receive a great deal of that and recognise it immediately.

    Does this work for an attraction as well as an operator?

    Yes, and the angles differ enough to be planned separately, because an attraction is competing to be part of somebody’s itinerary while an operator is competing to be the one who arranges the whole trip.

    An attraction often has the easier story, since it is a place rather than a service. The round-ups are built from places.

    How is digital PR different from link building?

    Digital PR earns coverage and links through stories a desk wants to publish, while link building is the broader discipline of growing authority, including the listings and profiles that will never be a story.

    They overlap and we run both. See Link Building for Travel.

    How do you measure travel digital PR?

    On the relevance and authority of the coverage, the links earned, the referral traffic from the markets that matter and the planning-stage rankings that follow, rather than on a count of placements.

    We also watch whether the coverage puts you into the guides an assistant quotes, since that is increasingly where an itinerary comes from.

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    Talk to a travel digital PR specialist

    Tell us what you sell, which markets your travellers come from and what is genuinely happening with the business in the next few seasons. We will come back with which titles you are missing from, what a story could be and what the first ninety days would cover. Our Dubai office is at Meydan Grandstand in Nad Al Sheba, on +971 4 251 8056.