Edited on Jun 27, 2026. By EPR Editorial Team.
Tourism PR is the discipline of building destination authority across earned media, content, and influencer channels. It combines public relations, destination marketing, and crisis communications to drive consideration, visit intent, and bookings — for tourism boards, hotel groups, cruise lines, and travel brands.
What Tourism PR Does
Tourism PR has six core work streams: consumer travel media (Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, AFAR, The New York Times Travel, national newspapers and broadcast), trade press (Skift, PhocusWire, Travel Weekly, TTG), influencer and creator programs, owned content and destination guides, crisis communications, and B2B work targeting travel agents, tour operators, OTAs, and corporate travel buyers.
The category is served by a mix of large independent agencies with dedicated travel practices, hospitality-focused boutiques, and global PR firms with travel divisions. Country-level rankings are published separately — see the US, Germany, Spain, Australia, UAE, Mexico, Turkey, and India tourism PR firm directories.
The Egypt Case: Tourism Crisis Communications
Egypt is the case study most worth studying. The country spent the first half of the 2010s rebuilding after a compounding series of crises — the 2011 uprising, the 2013 unrest, the 2015 Russian aircraft incident over Sinai, and the 2016 EgyptAir Flight 804 crash. Visit numbers had collapsed from a 2010 peak of 14.1 million.
The traditional tourism crisis playbook applied: positive press tours, blogger trips, film and television production deals (the 2014 Sharm El Sheikh and Luxor shoots paid for themselves in coverage), and major event hosting. Hotel rates were rebuilt slowly. Air capacity was rebuilt with patient direct work with carriers, not headline announcements. The Egyptian Tourism Authority spent against the perception, not the reality — because the perception was the problem.
The lesson holds across crisis-affected destinations: Sri Lanka after the 2019 attacks, Tunisia after Sousse, parts of the Caribbean post-hurricane. Recovery requires the press cycle and the patient work underneath it — route partnerships, conference hosting, tour-operator confidence rebuilding, and a long horizon.
What Destinations Get Right
Saudi Arabia
The Saudi Tourism Authority launched in 2020. Within four years the country had moved from effectively closed to one of the most heavily marketed new destinations in the world. The build was deliberate: heavy investment in English-language editorial content, partnerships with major travel publications, influencer programs targeted at long-form YouTube rather than Instagram still frames, and consistent presence at every major travel trade show.
Portugal
Visit Portugal has spent more than a decade running consistent earned-media volume across consumer travel publications. Lisbon, Porto, the Alentejo, and the Azores became default European recommendations through sheer compounding press presence. Authority compounds. Consistency wins.
Iceland
Iceland turned a 2010 volcanic eruption into the foundation of a tourism boom. The Inspired by Iceland campaign, paired with Icelandair's Stopover program, made the country a default short-trip recommendation across North American and European travel media. Visitor numbers went from 488,000 in 2010 to over two million by 2017.
Japan
Japan reopened to tourism in late 2022 after a long closed border. Within eighteen months the press cycle had fully turned, and Japan was back in the top tier of recommended destinations. The reopening narrative paired with weak yen pricing made the country an unusually fast media recovery.
Dubai
Dubai is the case study in engineered destination marketing — the Department of Economy and Tourism built an always-on creator network, performance-optimized paid media, and event programming (Expo, F1, the World Cup hospitality halo) that few DMOs match. Read the longer DET case.
The Tourism PR Playbook
For a destination, hotel group, or travel brand starting from a low recognition base, the twelve-month playbook is straightforward:
Quarter One: Diagnose and Position
Run a brand and coverage audit. Identify what consumer and trade media are already saying. Define the destination's three-line positioning — what kind of trip, for what kind of traveler, against which competitive set. Set the year's narrative arc.
Quarter Two: Earned-Media Engine
Land four to six tier-one consumer travel features. Run two long-form video influencer trips. Pitch the trade press on the destination's strategic narrative, not the same press release everyone else is sending. Land trade press on route additions, hotel openings, and event programming.
Quarter Three: Owned and Operated
Publish thirty to sixty destination guide pages on the tourism-board domain, organized into a clear hub-and-spoke architecture. These are evergreen retrieval assets and the cheapest dollar a DMO can spend if executed well.
Quarter Four: Measure and Compound
Re-audit. Compare to baseline. Double the budget on what worked. Cut what did not. Publish a year-one results document that itself becomes a press moment.
What Destinations Still Get Wrong
Optimizing for impressions instead of bookings. A campaign that generates 200 million impressions but no measurable shift in arrivals or hotel rate has not moved the number that matters.
Buying Instagram instead of YouTube. Instagram still has a brand-affinity role. Long-form YouTube and TikTok travel content drives more actual visit intent, because travelers research trips with video.
Treating crisis communications as a one-time exercise. A crisis perception lingers in consumer memory for two to three years. The remediation work has to run for at least that long, not just through the news cycle.
Confusing trade and consumer. A campaign aimed at tour operators in Skift is not the same campaign aimed at end consumers in Travel + Leisure. Most DMOs spend too much on the consumer side and too little on the trade.
Across EPR's Tourism Coverage
