How much notice should press trips have?
“Dear Richard, We’d love to invite you on a press trip with our client, Hotel A. To boost the chances of your being free and to give you ample time to secure commissions, it will depart in five months’ time.” |
… an invitation to me has never once begun. Five months? More like five minutes. The vast majority of invites I so kindly and luckily receive are for itineraries commencing in the subsequent two months. Last week’s trio offered 47, 41 and 29 days’ notice respectively. Such a short window rarely works for me, and especially not in spring — usually the peak time for a northern hemisphere travel journalist, with (hopefully) multiple places to go and to write up for publication ahead of peak summer season. In all of those cases, I already had a conflicting trip in the diary. Obviously this is only my perspective. Having worked on the other side, I also know all too well that pesky clients frequently take ages to get their act together in terms of confirming press trips with PRs. Those narrow deadlines bemoaned above are more often than not the same ones passed onto you. I suppose the takeout here is to keep up the good fight, to keep cajoling your clients to give more notice — so that you can finalise spring trips, in particular, before the end of the previous year. |
What Richard thinks…
“A nice take on the “new tours” press release by Lotus’s Jess Cochrane. It maybe takes a paragraph too long to get to the new tours — most of interest to me — but I like the remote-location and psychological news angles she’s added to give this a newsier quality.”