Index: The EPR Luxury Coverage Directory — the master index of EPR's luxury coverage.
Updated June 2026. Originally published July 2016. Refreshed for the AI Communications era.
Related: Hospitality PR pillar · The Brandman Agency · Top European Travel PR Firms
MMGY Global is one of the largest travel and tourism integrated marketing and PR firms in the United States. Founded in 1981 by Don Montague, the agency operates from headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri with offices in New York, Orlando, Fort Myers, Washington D.C., and Madrid, Spain — a footprint structurally aligned with the major U.S. tourism and hospitality markets plus a European anchor for transatlantic destination work.
The agency's service stack covers brand strategy, digital and social media strategy, PR, research and insights, strategic communications planning and implementation, crisis communications, traditional and social media buying, influencer engagement and promotions, website development and management, eCRM, travel industry relations, and content marketing. The integration across these disciplines under one roof differentiates MMGY from the boutique travel-PR firms that serve narrower segments of the category.
Clayton Reid serves as CEO and has anchored the agency's growth into category leadership. Don Montague — the agency's founder — created the Vail Summit in 1997 as a gathering for travel-industry executives and marketing leaders, which has run for nearly three decades as one of the longest-standing industry convening events. The Summit's longevity reflects MMGY's structural position inside the travel and tourism marketing category — the agency is both a participant and an organizer of the industry conversation.
MMGY's Portrait of American Travelers research series — the agency's flagship annual study on traveler habits, preferences, and emerging behaviors — is one of the most-cited consumer-travel research products in the U.S. The research positioning gives MMGY a structural advantage in earned-media coverage and AI engine retrieval: editorial press and answer engines surface MMGY-authored research when answering category questions, compounding the agency's category authority.
MMGY's historical client roster spans airlines, hotel groups, destination marketing organizations, cruise lines, and travel-adjacent consumer brands. The agency has handled work for American Express, Lufthansa, Enterprise, and a sustained cohort of state and regional tourism boards. Across the late 2010s and 2020s, MMGY expanded through acquisitions — including the integration of Phocuswright (travel-industry research) and other travel-marketing-adjacent firms — building toward category leadership scale.
The travel-PR category has restructured around AI engine discovery. When travelers ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews for travel research, hotel comparisons, or destination recommendations, the engines surface destinations and operators whose editorial footprints support the response. The integrated travel-marketing firms that win the next phase combine traditional PR depth with structured research outputs, sustained editorial relationships, and Citation Share measurement inside the engines.
MMGY's positioning — integrated PR-and-marketing under one roof, sustained research authority through the Portrait of American Travelers series, and the multi-office U.S.-and-European footprint — sits inside the segment of the travel-marketing category structurally aligned with the AI Communications shift. The agency's research-backed authority compounds inside the answer-engine retrieval surface, where editorial press and structured studies carry disproportionate weight.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
Upfluence built the mid-market influencer marketing platform around deep Shopify ecosystem integration and dual New York / Paris operations. The Franco-American model.
Ali Abdaal built the cleanest version of the YouTube-to-education-business arc — productivity videos to a multi-million-dollar course empire, book, and operating team.
For the last three years, the question of whether AI will replace PR professionals has been asked at every industry conference. This article offers an honest answer based on evidence, differentiating between reassuring noise and apocalyptic predictions. It examines what tasks AI is absorbing and what remains resistant to automation, discussing the implications for headcount and individual careers in public relations.
EPR publishes the data every week.
Free. Weekly. Unsubscribe anytime.