Saad Hafeez is a seasoned professional with experience in Communications, Media, and Public Relations. He is the Travel Advocacy Consultant with Al Inara Tourism Middle East, and Co-founder of Momentum PR Pakistan
PR is all about perception, and the perception of a destination by a potential visitor is absolutely crucial to tourism. If a destination has a bad reputation, people will stay away; It’s that simple. PR is important for every community that wants to increase its tourism and hospitality business.
Travel and Tourism are one of the world’s largest economic sectors. Which contributes towards the GDP worldwide. The industry has always shown tremendous growth year after year. Along with advertising and marketing, public relations consultancy plays an important role in promoting and shaping a favorable image of the destination, creating a desire to travel, encouraging and influencing consumers to purchase tourist products and services, increasing engagement with target audiences, and more.
However, tourism and travel brands have also begun to explore social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to effectively reach new audiences. This trend is quite obvious as it increases brand presence with eye-catching images/videos and testimonials by travelers who post their own experiences when visiting the destinations. When it comes to the travel and tourism industry, public relations can effortlessly provide greater connections with audiences by communicating key messages in the right channel at a convenient moment and is much more inexpensive when compared to spent on advertising campaigns.
Public relations should be an integral part of all tourism and travel companies’ ongoing marketing plan. The tourism industry relies heavily on public relations to communicate with the public, gain promotion, and attract visitors. PR help tourism businesses attract visitors by developing positive relationships with the local community and the media. It can also be used as a tool for crisis management when something goes wrong or there are negative events that affect travel plans. Public relations also allow brands to create a relationship with customers. This is important because it makes the development of both long-term and short-term marketing strategies possible. This usually has the effect of making a destination appear more attractive.
Technology has made Tourism more accessible and with constant improvements in technology and increased accessibility through airlines and other forms of transport, the implication is that people from all over can travel easily around the world without having to worry about their physical well-being when traveling long distances.
For instance, Dubai recently opened up some amazing attractions one of is the Museum of the Future opened in February 2022, the gentle brilliance of the building is perfectly paired with the approach museum curators took in guiding visitors as they navigate the future. The museum presents ideas of where humanity is heading and the challenges it faces, placing the visitor as an active participant in the center of that story and someone with the capacity to influence future events.
In this age, PR has become crucial to a tourism board’s success, and it can help large areas like a city or state bring in more visitors. PR helps to establish a positive image for a location while promoting activities, attractions, restaurants, and events, which will naturally lead to an increase in visitors. Tourism PR should mainly focus on promoting the best which they have to offer, advising travel media about the destination, and more media fam trips which will strengthen their relationship with travel media which will be easier on convincing the travelers that the destination is a must-go Destination.