MYPR Survey Helps to Hone Press Trip Process

Press trips are one of the best tools that public relations professionals have for garnering media coverage. Letting a journalist personally experience a destination, hotel or outdoor activity provides them with firsthand knowledge that is key to crafting their stories.

Malen Yantis Public Relations hosts numerous group and individual media visits on behalf of its clients each year. Our goal is always to put together the best trips possible and ensure that the media get everything they need. In order to confirm that we are doing this we designed a survey, for both media we have worked with and those we have not, to pinpoint exactly what they are looking for.

While we are confident that we provide a top-notch press trip experience for all media we always are trying to better ourselves. That’s why it is so important to understand media preferences and design trips based on their feedback, this way we attract the right writers and keep them coming back on MYPR trips.

We had over 140 writers respond and from those responses we were able to determine the following key insights:

• Writers don’t typically have a story assignment prior to a press trip. We discovered it is much more common for writers to get story ideas while on the trip and then pitch their editors.
• A majority of writers have no preference whether a trip is over a weekend versus mid-week.
• Media prefer solo trips versus a group trip.
• For most writers the option to bring a guest is not a factor however, family travel writers prefer the option of bringing children/spouses because it will often enhance their story.
• Most writers think 3 days is the ideal length for a domestic press trip.
• We learned that media find it helpful to have a more robust itinerary with descriptions of activities, restaurants, etc. as opposed to just bare bones; date, time and place itinerary. Incorporating all of the social media handles and hashtags that they may want to use while on the trip is also helpful.

The findings from the survey confirmed most, if not all, of what we already are doing on behalf of our clients. MYPR is continually getting feedback from writers about its press trip process – we’ve realized we are doing some unique things that media have not experienced before e.g. we distribute an introductory email to all group participants prior to the trip so they can connect with each other directly and via social media before arriving.

However, there is always room for improvement! We were able to garner some interesting ideas from the survey and will be implementing those ideas into future press trips.