How to Choose a PR agency for Tourism companies

By Aidan Sowa, CEO and Founder, Frontier Industries | October 2026

In 2019 the world took a holiday from travelling, and the industry learned what it was worth by losing it. Five years on, the crowds are back in full, and they brought their politics with them. This guide reviewed the recovery data from the industry's global body, the distribution economics of the experience platforms, and the overtourism arguments now following tour operators into council chambers and comment sections, and drew the line that organises this whole decision: a tourism company no longer sells only experiences. It sells its right to operate in places that are actively debating whether they want it there. Your agency must be able to work both sides of that sentence, the selling and the right, or it will win you attention that costs you permission.

I Discrimen: Demand is public, and so is the argument about you

Start with the recovered world. UN Tourism recorded 1.4 billion international tourist arrivals in 2024, a virtual return to pre pandemic levels, with international tourism receipts reaching 1.6 trillion dollars (UN Tourism, 2025). Demand is not your problem. Legitimacy is becoming it, because the same recovery that fills your tours fills the squares, the housing debates and the local elections of the places you operate in.

The distinction follows. A generation ago a tour operator's reputation lived with its customers and its trade partners. Today it also lives with residents who never buy a ticket, officials who licence your guides and cap your group sizes, and journalists for whom tourism itself has become a contested beat. An agency that only knows how to address customers will keep generating demand into a tightening political space, and will be genuinely surprised when the cap, the licence review or the protest arrives.

The right agency reads a destination the way an investor reads a balance sheet: assets, liabilities, and the direction of travel. Ask for that reading in the first meeting, in your top three operating locations, and grade the firm's realism about the politics as carefully as its media lists.

II Machina: The experience shelf belongs to platforms, and platforms run on reviews

One consequence deserves its own paragraph because it changes who should lead the agency relationship inside your company. When reputation, distribution and legitimacy are one system, the agency cannot report to a junior marketing coordinator armed with a clip target. It needs a principal who can fix a boarding bottleneck the reviews keep naming, adjust a group size before a council meeting makes it a headline, and sign off a resident benefit without a quarterly committee. The calibre of agency you can usefully hire is set by the authority of the person across the table from them. Companies that understand this staff the relationship at operations level and get strategy from their retainer. Companies that staff it at assistant level get activity, and then blame the market for the difference.

Now the commercial machine. The modern traveller assembles a trip inside platforms, search, maps, and the experience marketplaces, where your tour sits in a ranked grid beside forty substitutes, sorted by rating, review count, price and photography. Tripadvisor's traveller research found 72 percent of travellers always or frequently read reviews before deciding on things to do, and the experiences category is the purest review market in travel (Tripadvisor and Ipsos MORI, 2019). Your listing is your shopfront, your reviews are your footfall, and your rating is a price setting instrument.

This changes the agency's real job description. Alongside media relations sit three operating functions: review system management across platforms, with response discipline and pattern fixing; listing storytelling, the photography, titles and descriptions that convert a grid position into a booking; and the earned media that feeds the whole machine by giving the platforms and the search engines a brand worth ranking.

An agency that proposes a press campaign and treats your platform presence as your operations team's housekeeping has divided the job at exactly the wrong joint. In the experience economy, reputation, distribution and communications are one system, and the retainer should be bought as one system or not at all.

III Exemplum: The overtourism story, told from the operator's side of the fence

Take the defining narrative problem of the decade as the worked example. In city after city, residents argue that tourism extracts: housing converted to short stays, squares converted to queues, work converted to seasonal service. Operators know the countervailing facts, employment, small business ecosystems, conservation funded by ticket revenue, and they are routinely astonished that the counter argument loses. It loses because it is usually made late, defensively, and by the industry in aggregate rather than by named local companies with local faces.

Companies that hold their ground share a method. They publish their local economics before they are attacked, local staff hired, local suppliers paid, taxes and fees contributed, conservation or community funds documented. They design visible resident benefits, locals days, resident rates, group size limits adopted before they are imposed. And they brief local media as a constituency in its own right, not as an afterthought to the travel pages.

Note the agency implication. This work is public affairs wearing tourism clothes, and most travel agencies do not own the skill. Ask finalists for a contested destination they have worked and what they built before the controversy, not during it. The honest ones will describe deposits of credibility. The rest will describe crisis statements, which is the sound of arriving after the vote.

IV Damnum: What the wrong agency costs when the politics turn

Price the failure in this industry's actual currencies. A licence conditioned or a group size cap imposed in your flagship destination removes inventory no marketing can replace. A platform rating slide, unmanaged, is a demotion on the only shelf that matters, paid for daily in bookings that go to the operator one row down. A safety incident at an attraction or on a tour, handled slowly or defensively, becomes the defining search result for your brand in every market at once, because the experience grid does not respect borders.

There is a quieter loss: seasonality mismanagement. Tourism demand is savagely seasonal, and communications bought at a flat monthly rhythm spends equally in the months when you are sold out and the months when you are empty. The wrong agency's reporting hides this, impressions delivered on schedule, while the right agency's calendar is built backwards from your capacity curve, filling shoulder seasons and protecting peak pricing. In a business where a large share of annual profit is made in a few high months and the rest is survival, that calendar discipline is worth more than any single placement.

V Genus: The field of agencies a tourism company actually meets

Score finalists on the integrated grid this industry actually runs on.

VI Regio: Every operating location is a separate political country

Tourism companies run a portfolio of permissions. The licensing regime, the resident mood, the media market and the competitive set differ completely between your beach destination, your heritage city and your mountain base, and a communications plan written at head office level for all three will be wrong in each of them in a different way.

Interrogate by location. For your two most politically sensitive destinations, ask the team to brief you as if you were the incoming country manager: who licences us, who opposes us, which local outlet sets the tone, what did our company do last year that residents remember kindly or otherwise. The fluency either exists at that granularity or the agency relationship will be a translation exercise in which you supply the local knowledge the retainer was meant to provide.

The source market map needs the same granularity in reverse. Your German guests, your American guests and your domestic weekenders arrive through different media, different platforms and different anxieties. An agency that segments by market with named channels per segment is practising tourism PR. One that proposes international exposure is practising adjectives.

VII Occasio: The opening is the operator as the destination's best witness

The hopeful side is substantial, because the data gives operators a story most have not yet claimed. Average international spending settled around 1,100 dollars per trip in 2024, above the pre pandemic norm, and receipts grew faster than arrivals in many destinations (UN Tourism, 2025). Travel is not shrinking into resentment. It is concentrating, in value and in controversy, which means the operators who can demonstrate that their visitors are the valuable kind, longer staying, locally spending, off peak travelling, hold the strongest hand in every policy conversation and every partnership negotiation in their destinations.

Communications is how that hand gets shown. The agency that builds your visitor quality evidence, and routes it to officials, platforms, partners and press as one dossier, is doing strategy, not publicity. The same dossier wins better platform treatment, better hotel and airline partnerships, and a hearing when the cap is debated.

There is a creative opening as well. The traveller's appetite for the authentic, documented across the review research, rewards operators whose stories are specific: the guide whose family has worked the route for decades, the conservation levy itemised on the ticket, the workshop behind the craft. Specificity is cheap to produce and impossible for competitors to copy, which is why the best tourism agencies run their clients' operations as story mines rather than waiting for campaign season.

The public relations services page sets out how reputation systems, legitimacy work and source market storytelling are combined, the people responsible are profiled on the industries team page, and the resources index gathers the companion guide on destination marketing organisations, the public bodies whose politics interlock with yours.

VIII Consilium: Appoint the integrator, and prove it with documents

Write the brief as three assignments stapled together, because that is the job: a platform and review system, a legitimacy programme for your sensitive destinations, and a source market story calendar mapped to your capacity curve. Require each finalist to respond to all three with named people and first quarter deliverables. Discard, without nostalgia, the beautiful response that answers only the third.

Set the documents test. Ask for a live client listing set with its rating trajectory, a resident facing economic summary they have produced for an operator, and one incident file with the first statement and the follow up. Documents end arguments that credentials decks are designed to prolong.

Contract against the system: response standards on reviews across platforms, a quarterly rating and mix report per flagship product, the legitimacy calendar per sensitive destination, incident rota terms, and named senior ownership of the political work. Review twice a year, once in your peak and once in your trough, because an agency can look excellent in one season and absent in the other, and you are buying both.

IX Quaesita: Questions tourism operators ask us

How much should a tourism company spend on an agency?

Integrated representation for a multi location operator typically prices in the mid four to low five figures monthly, varying with the number of destinations carrying political work and the platform portfolio under management. Single market operators can start narrower, but should not buy media relations alone and call it the system; the review and legitimacy layers are where the protection lives.

Can PR really influence our platform rankings?

Indirectly and genuinely. Platforms rank on rating, review volume and recency, conversion and listing quality, all of which a disciplined reputation programme improves, while earned media feeds the branded search that drives direct and platform demand alike. No agency can buy placement, and any that promises it is describing a terms of service violation, but the inputs to the ranking are substantially communications work.

How do we respond to overtourism criticism aimed at our company?

With documents before adjectives: your local employment, supplier spend, taxes, group limits and resident benefits, published in your own channels and briefed to local media and officials before the criticism peaks. Then with presence, executives who attend, listen and adjust visibly. The criticism is partly a demand to be treated as a stakeholder; companies that act like neighbours are usually granted the hearing that companies acting like extractors are denied.

What belongs in our incident plan for tours and attractions?

One spokesperson chain, pre approved holding language for the likeliest events, medical and authority liaison steps, guest communication templates in your main source languages, and a rule that facts move first and commentary follows verification. The agency should drill the plan with your operations leads twice a year, because an unexercised plan is a hypothesis.

Should we work with travel influencers and media trips?

Yes, selectively, where the audience matches a segment you actually serve and the deliverables are contracted with usage rights and platform posting specified. The measure is bookings and listing movement in the following quarter, not the beauty of the content. Trips that flatter the team's portfolio and fill no seats are a cost centre wearing a costume.

How do we fill shoulder season with communications?

By aiming different proof at different segments on a calendar built from capacity: the events and festivals you can attach to, the weather honest stories for the markets that escape to you, the group and education business whose cycles ignore your peak. This is the highest returning work a tourism agency does, and the brief should demand the shoulder plan by name.

When is a destination specialist better than a bigger firm?

When your binding constraint is permission in one or two places rather than awareness in many. Political and community fluency is local and personal, and the firm that holds it is rarely the largest in the room. Buy the constraint, not the logo, and let the bigger firm earn the wider brief later if the constraint moves.

X Modus: How this guide was built, and its limits

This guide draws on UN Tourism's World Tourism Barometer reporting for arrival, receipt and spending figures, and on Tripadvisor and Ipsos MORI research for traveller review behaviour. Industry figures are global as reported by those bodies, and conditions in individual destinations vary widely, which is a premise of the guide rather than a caveat. It addresses communications and reputation strategy; licensing and safety obligations sit with your own regulatory and legal advisers in each operating location.

XI Incipe: Where Frontier Industries fits

Frontier Industries represents tourism operators on the integrated model: review and platform systems run as revenue infrastructure, legitimacy programmes built in sensitive destinations before they are needed, and source market storytelling calendared against capacity instead of habit. The publicity is the visible third of the work. The other two thirds are why the publicity keeps being allowed to work.

If your company is choosing an agency against that standard, begin at https://industries.frontiercapitals.com/start-an-industry-campaign/ or call 401-219-4207. Bring your platform ratings and your most sensitive destination. The first conversation will cover both, in that order, because that is the order your results will arrive in.

Sources

1. UN Tourism, World Tourism Barometer, January 2025. https://www.travelweek.ca/news/destinations/global-tourism-returns-to-pre-pandemic-strength-in-2024/?tw_brand=TW&tw_item=TWD&tw_product=Article&tw_client=UN-Tourism 2. UN Tourism, International Tourism Recovers to Pre Pandemic Levels in 2024, 2025. https://www.premiumbeautynews.com/en/global-tourism-recovered-to-pre,25092 3. UN Tourism, World Tourism Barometer reporting summary, 2025. https://www.paxnews.com/news/buzz/global-tourism-returned-pre-covid-levels-2024-un-tourism 4. Tripadvisor and Ipsos MORI, Online Reviews Remain a Trusted Source When Booking Trips, 2019. https://tripadvisor.mediaroom.com/press-releases?item=126297%3FasPDF%3D1&asPDF=1 5. Tripadvisor and Ipsos MORI study coverage, Hospitality Technology, 2019. https://hospitalitytech.com/study-online-reviews-remain-trusted-source-information-when-booking-restaurants-hotels 6. World Travel and Tourism Council, Economic Impact Research, 2024. https://wttc.org/research/economic-impact 7. OECD, Tourism Trends and Policies, 2024. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/oecd-tourism-trends-and-policies-2024_80872cac-en.html 8. Edelman, Trust Barometer, 2024. https://www.edelman.com/trust/2024/trust-barometer 9. Phocuswright, Travel research and market intelligence, 2024. https://www.phocuswright.com/ 10. Public Relations Society of America, About PRSA, 2024. https://www.prsa.org/about/about-prsa