I got an invite to a press trip to South Africa yesterday. It looked very tempting. Everything paid for. But as always with travel press trips the itinerary was jammed - Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa in the space of 3 days. How is anyone supposed to take away anything meaningful from such a whirlwind of experiences? As a freelance I need one or two strong themes and depth, not breadth.
As soon as you get on a plane on a press trip you are fair game to everyone who has had a role in hosting you - every restaurant who feeds you, each hotel that accommodates you, every ground handler that looks after you. A chaos of voices all trying to get your attention...
Maybe if you work on a travel desk at a newspaper you can crowbar lots of mentions for all these different people into a series of bits and pieces, but as a freelance it's hopeless. By about day 2 of one of these trips you are so overloaded with info you don't want to see another rep from somewhere else telling you about how great their product is... You also don't want any of the other journos on the trip too close to you in case they see the same angle you see and write about it too... You're gagging for a bit of free space with no one else around so you can get on with the job of watching and thinking and writing...
It's a shame as press trips are quite social and thus good fun... going solo as I tend to do is solitary and sometimes lonely. But to generate great copy that is unique and compelling press trips are a waste of time and that's just the way it goes...
One thought on “Why travel press trips just don’t work…”
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I'm late to the party (come to think of it, I appear to be the only guest at the party), but I've got to disagree with you about the utility of press trips. They can be useful, depending on whether they have a theme, how well-organized they are, and whether the writer is locked into a preconceived story assignment or has the flexibility to write about topics that are inspired by what happens during the trip.
I especially like trips that take me to places I might not visit otherwise. For example, I went on an architecture-themed Swiss National Tourist Office trip a few years ago that took me to La Chaux-de-Fonds, a watchmaking town that's well off the tourist track but turned out to be a fascinating example of early 19th Century urban planning. I ended up writing a lot of coverage about La Chaux-de-Fonds, so the trip was a win for both the SNTO and for me.