Struggling to Fill Your Press Trip? Read This.
If it feels harder to fill press trips, that’s because it is. Here’s how to fix it (including a controversial strategy that may already happen behind the scenes.)
Joni Sweet is a seasoned writer, editor, and content strategist with 13+ years of media experience. In this newsletter, Joni reveals her current assignments and insider tips to help PR professionals sharpen their pitches, avoid rookie mistakes, land coverage for their clients, and build stronger relationships with writers. Get ready for candid advice, a touch of sass, and secret strategies to make your pitches stand out.
Struggling to fill press trips? It’s not you—it’s us, the travel writers. The industry has changed. Anti-freelancer policies, sinking rates, and endless layoffs mean we have fewer editors to pitch and even fewer reasons to hop on a plane for a trip that won’t pay off. In private groups, many of my travel writer colleagues say they’re taking fewer press trips than ever before.
Press trips aren’t vacations—they’re work. But they take us away from the decent-paying assignments that actually pay the bills, and once upon a time, we could justify that because we knew we’d sell enough stories to make up for it. Now? The assignments we do get often don’t compensate enough to even cover our Uber ride to the airport. Yes, it’s that bad.
Then there’s “press trip debt”—that sinking feeling when a writer has more unwritten stories than time to write them. We want to cover the trips we take—but survival means prioritizing better-paying assignments. So, out of guilt, we decline new invitations that hit our inbox until we play catch up, even if we’d love to join those trips.
You can’t change the economics of this industry. But if you want travel writers to say yes to your press trip, there are some creative things you can do to make your invitation harder to decline (including a very controversial strategy, which I’ll share at the end). Here’s how.
1. Take the human-first approach
The major difference between a press trip and a vacation (besides the fact that you don’t owe anything to anyone, except maybe your credit company, after taking a personal getaway) is the grind. Busy itineraries require jetlagged writers to hit the ground running from 7am to 10pm, squeezing in emails and paid work when we should be sleeping. It’s equal parts invigorating and exhausting.
We get it—you want to show off the best of your destination, hotel, and experiences. But if a trip looks like it’ll run us into the ground, we’re reluctant to take it. The solution? Build breathing room into your itinerary—and make it clear in your invite.
Amanda McNally from Malen Yantis Public Relations nailed this in a press trip invitation a few years ago when she wrote:
“We don’t overschedule our press trips because we believe we all need downtime to relax, explore and do things like answer emails.
We don’t require a story assignment to attend because this is a relationship and the best story ideas come from the visit, not before it.
The trip is fully hosted, inclusive of flights, dining, activities, etc.
You select any and all activities you participate in to ensure they appeal to you and fit your needs.”
These guidelines immediately made me feel like this was someone who gets it—someone I’d actually want to work with. Instead of feeling resistance toward a potentially exhausting itinerary, I found myself actually wanting to say yes.