The importance of Digital PR for travel brands
Holiday planning has become a digital-first experience, from customers gathering inspiration and comparing prices to making online bookings. This shift has resulted in a strong focus on digital presence for travel brands, bringing the strength of Digital PR to the forefront of marketing strategies.
Digital PR is now more than a desirable asset, being an indispensable tool for travel companies looking to carve their niche in the competitive digital marketplace.
But how do travel brands successfully step their foot into the world of Digital PR?
In this article, we’re going to cover:
- Why should travel companies invest in Digital PR?
- Successful Digital PR tactics for travel companies
- The impact of seasonality on travel brands’ PR strategies
- Semetrical’s success in the travel industry
Why should travel companies invest in Digital PR?
For all travel companies, from local agencies to international airlines and hotels, investing in Digital PR is essential. A robust online presence is paramount for you to effectively engage digital-first audiences.
Given the intense competition in the travel sector, raising brand visibility becomes exceedingly important. Digital PR proves itself as one of the most effective marketing strategies to bolster this brand awareness.
Through Digital PR, your travel brand can earn mentions across a host of relevant platforms, both print and digital. These could include lifestyle and travel news websites, as well as region-specific news outlets, helping you reach your target audience more effectively and efficiently.
The influence of Digital PR on travel brand’s SEO
Digital PR yields substantial benefits for a brand’s SEO as it helps foster a solid backlink profile by securing high-quality inbound links to your website from trustworthy sources.
These backlinks not only improve your website’s authority but also enhance your search engine rankings, increasing your visibility to potential customers. On top of this, Digital PR facilitates the creation of relevant and engaging content, a crucial factor for ranking on key travel related search terms.
Staying competitive in the sector
Numerous travel brands have already recognised the potency of Digital PR and are harnessing it to stand out in their field. If your company isn’t utilising the power of Digital PR, you’re not merely missing out on potential gains, but you’re also risking falling behind competitors who are.
Successful Digital PR tactics for travel companies
Digital PR involves an array of tactics that can be customised to suit a brand’s precise goals. From our experience, here are a few that have proven particularly effective in the travel sector:
The role of reactive PR
Reactive PR entails responding quickly and professionally to current events or market trends. Given the travel industry’s dynamic nature, timely reactions can have a significant impact. From crisis management to capitalising on trending topics, reactive PR can help brands maintain relevance and connect with their audience.
If you notice a topic trending on social media or even in the news, your brand can offer a reactive comment to the press to add additional, relevant commentary to the evolving trending topic.
For example, during summer heatwaves, we tapped into the news cycle by providing expert commentary from Your Overseas Home, experts in overseas property. The comment that we outreached to press, on behalf of the overseas property brand, discussed what you need to do during heatwaves to ensure that your property stays cool, which leaned into the trending story about the heatwaves happening at the time.
This comment achieved over 30 pieces of coverage, including being covered by titles such as Huffington Post, The Express, and Woman&Home, all of which are publications where the brand’s target audience are already engaged.
Power of listicles
Listicles have proven to be an essential tactic for Digital PR. They present information in digestible bites, simplifying complex ideas for readers. Think ‘Top 10 hidden gems for UK travellers‘ or ‘2025’s most popular holiday destinations‘. These pieces can generate high traffic, foster strong engagement, and earn valuable backlinks from top tier media.
Here at Semetrical, we recently outreached a listicle in order to promote our latest Travel Trends Report, which uncovered the most popular destinations where Brits to search for flights.
This story gained coverage from national publications, such as The Sun and The Express, providing great brand awareness for Semetrical and the recently launched report.
Data-led & content marketing campaigns
Data-led campaigns utilise valuable insights to inform PR initiatives. In the travel sector, this could involve leveraging user data and booking trends alongside using your storytelling skills to create a strong and compelling data campaign. Content marketing campaigns, meanwhile, focus on generating valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a defined audience, ultimately leading to profitable customer action.
One of our favourite past data campaigns was one that we created for Your Overseas Home, looking into what type of property £300,000, the average UK property price at the time, can get you across the rest of Europe.
We gathered an array of data that could provide multiple hooks and angles, including the most affordable places in Europe to purchase a property, the most expensive places in Europe to purchase property, the places in Europe that offer the most floor space for your money, and more.
This data-led campaign was covered by publications such as Daily Mail and Estate Agent Today.
The impact of seasonality on travel brands’ PR strategies
Seasonality plays a crucial role in the travel industry. It shapes everything from consumer behaviour to demand for different travel services, impacting the profitability of travel companies. By aligning PR strategies with the travel calendar and planning campaigns around peak travel times, companies can ensure their brand is the first thing customers think of when they’re ready to book.
Further, keeping tabs on awareness day calendars and aligning PR efforts with these can open up excellent opportunities for creating engaging and timely content, thereby driving interest and visibility. For example, ‘Cheap Flight Day’ and ‘World Tourism Day’ are two awareness days that are ideal for brands within the travel industry to incorporate into their PR strategies.
Semetrical’s success in the travel industry
Your Overseas Home is a property website for people looking to relocate or buy a second home abroad. The website offers a wealth of informative assets to help home buyers in their property purchase journey, as well as listing thousands of properties in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Cyprus.
For the past six years, Your Overseas Home has undertaken research to reveal the true cost of living in some of the most popular move-abroad destinations – but they’ve always found it difficult to disseminate the information and get the projects the attention they deserve.
With this in mind and in the context of the cost of living crisis that has been gripping the UK and world more generally, Semetrical worked alongside Your Overseas Home to produce The Overseas Cost of Living Index 2023. The aim of this campaign was to increase brand awareness and drive backlink acquisition from top-tier media.
Our data-led campaign saw great success and gained 34 items of coverage with an average Domain Rating (DR) of 55. This included 22 links overall and 12 ‘follow’ links, which equates to a 69% link to coverage rate.
How can we help your brand?
Would you like to see Digital PR success for your travel brand? Check out our Digital PR services to find out how we can help you or get in touch for more information.
