How Much Notice Should Press Trips Have?

… 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.