| Nicole Junas |
Ask Americans what they plan to prioritize in 2027, and two-thirds say they will favor experiences over material purchases, according to a Marriott Bonvoy and Harris Poll survey of more than 2,000 adults. Travel brands have heard some version of that for a decade. What gets less attention is what it means for the order in which we plan. If travelers want to be in the room for something, the something should come first. Press, creators, and search visibility all depend on it.
I have spent more than twenty years in public relations, and the pattern I see most often in travel planning is a tidy one. A destination or brand sets a media relations budget, a separate influencer budget, and a separate events budget. Each has its own goals, its own team, and its own report at the end of the quarter. It looks organized. In practice, it means each effort starts from zero. Travel brands do not have a channel problem. They have a handoff problem.
Consider the three kinds of work in turn, and what each needs from the others.
Experienced work is the live moment: a signature event, a hosted gathering, a pop-up, a first-of-its-kind itinerary. It is the most expensive of the three and the one most often treated as a standalone. It should be the opposite. A live moment is the raw material for everything else. It gives an editor a reason to write something new, rather than a restatement of what is already on your website. It gives a creator something real to film, rather than a scripted product shot. Design it for sharing. Ask what will be photographed, what will be quoted, and what a guest will tell a friend on the way home. If you cannot answer those questions, the format is not ready.
Influenced work is the reach beyond your press list. Creators speak to travelers who will never read a trade publication, and they produce content that can live well past the event. But creator content performs best when it comes from something worth attending. A creator at a real moment has a story to tell. A creator handed a brief and a hashtag has a deliverable. The difference shows in the work, and audiences notice it. The content should also not sit off to the side. The best of it belongs in your press outreach, your owned channels, and your partner materials.
Earned work is the credibility that lasts. Coverage in respected outlets does something paid and owned media cannot: it tells travelers that someone other than you finds the story worth telling. It also feeds the sources that search and AI tools draw on, which is a reason to care about quality over volume. But earned media needs news. Editors respond to a first, a season, a person, or a specific fact they can verify and cite. An experience supplies exactly that. Without one, media relations is left to pitch announcements, and announcements rarely earn attention.
Put together, the order matters. The experience creates the moment. Creators carry it to new audiences and return content you can reuse. Earned coverage gives the whole effort authority and a longer life. Remove the first and the other two have little to say. Remove the second and the moment reaches only the people in the room. Remove the third and the buzz fades with the next news cycle.
Planning in this order also changes how you measure. Instead of reporting placements, creator reach, and attendance as three separate tallies, trace each coverage item and each creator post back to a single live moment. When results connect to one cause, you can see what the moment produced and what it cost. A 2027 target needs a 2026 baseline, and that baseline is far easier to build when every number points to a common starting point. That also makes the plan easier to defend to a CFO.
There is one more thread that belongs in a 2027 plan, and it is rarely funded until it is needed. Travel brands face weather, safety incidents, labor disputes, and social backlash, and they face them fast. A live moment with media and creators in attendance raises the stakes, because more people are watching and recording. Set aside time and budget now for a response protocol, a prepared spokesperson, and pre-approved holding statements. The teams that handle a hard day well rarely improvise. They did the work in January.
Before you approve the plan, try a simple exercise. List every tactic in it: each event, each creator program, each pitch. Next to each one, write what it hands to the next. The event hands the creator a story and the editor a news hook. The creator hands back content and a wider audience. The coverage hands both a credibility that outlasts the moment. If you cannot name what a tactic hands forward, you have found a silo, and silos are where budgets go to be spent without being felt.
The travelers are asking for experiences. Build the plan so that every other tactic is there to carry one.
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Nicole Junas Ravlin is the founder and CEO of Junepr.
Source: www.odwyerpr.com
