Kerraway » Travel

Travel and PR

Michael Kerr — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 15:06:33 +0000

At a workshop organised earlier this week by the Latin American Travel Association, my journalist colleagues and I were asked by a tour operator whether we thought he needed to hire a PR firm or could make a stab at doing the job himself.

We all advised him to have a go. After all, he was the expert on his company and where it operated. As journalists, we told him, we much preferred dealing directly with people in the travel trade rather than through intermediaries.

There are some excellent PRs representing travel companies. Many of the best have worked previously in the travel trade or journalism, or both, and are running their own companies. There are bigger firms, too, that do a good job, particularly in representing companies that don’t have an office in Britain.

There are also a lot of poor ones. I’m thinking of those firms that insist their young staff phone us to say: “Have you got our press release?” I don’t know how many of these “press releases” I get every day –- I wouldn’t dare try to count them, but here’s an indication: one of my colleagues returned from maternity leave this year to find that in nine months she had been sent 22,000 emails, and most of those were from PR firms. I’ve been on the desk three times as long as she has, so it’s probably fair to assume that I get a few more.

There wouldn’t be time to read half of them, even if I agreed that they were as “interesting”, “thrilling” and “exciting” as the writers claim. There certainly isn’t time to respond to messages on an answerphone asking if I have received them.

Yesterday morning, I had an email from a PR firm asking whether I had received an earlier email about some hotels. One of the hotels was “new”, but there was nothing else in the email to still my finger over the delete button. The writer said she was looking forward to hearing my ideas. Hang on: surely ideas are what she is being paid to come up with . . .

Time to visit Germany?

Michael Kerr — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:30:28 +0000

A tiny bit of irony in a new poster from the German tourist board I’ve just seen outside Marks & Spencer in Victoria station. Above a picture of Michael Ballack in the national football strip are the words “Germany. A great place to visit when you’ve got time to spare.” In smaller letters, just above, it says: “You can’t beat Germany for value.”

Give the staycation a rest

Michael Kerr — Wed, 26 May 2010 15:41:01 +0000

This blog is coming to you from London, a city where, when people are escaping from their desks and then forced to return to their desks, they talk of nothing but holidays. Do they ever use the word vacation? No. So why do the witless staff of PR firms based in this same city insist on using inelegant variations of that word? In email after email my colleagues and I are bombarded with references to staycations, mancations and neighcations. This week, from the firm entrusted with burnishing the image of KLM, we received a “guide to the world’s best floatcations”. You know what the person who wrote that needs? A holiday.

Maharajas’ Express

Michael Kerr — Sun, 23 May 2010 20:09:15 +0000

My piece for the Telegraph about the Maharajas’ Express is now online. The photograph below is of the camel ride into the desert that I mention in the text.

Iceland’s volcano and the Brendan Voyage

Michael Kerr — Tue, 18 May 2010 11:32:54 +0000

I’ve taken this week off to get away from the office and the news and immerse myself in the archives, digging out the Telegraph’s best writing on journeys by water. But there’s no escaping that Icelandic volcano. Look at this, in a review by David Holloway of Tim Severin’s book The Brendan Voyage, published in 1978:

In brief, Mr Severin set out to do a “Kon Tiki” on behalf of St. Brendan. Medieval accounts said that the Irish Saint had gone to the “Promised Land.” An amount of circumstantial detail is supplied that could have been either the usual flummery of moral fables (dragons, giants and the like) or exact descriptions of natural phenomena observed while island-hopping across the north Atlantic. The giant smiths who threw hot rocks at Brendan, for instance, might have been an Icelandic volcano in eruption.

Plane view from the window seat

Michael Kerr — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 14:58:36 +0000

A recent piece in The New York Times on rediscovering the romance of the window seat on planes has prompted a flood of window-seat photographs from readers. Which reminds me: flying isn’t something I’ve enjoyed much for a long time. Aloft by William Langewiesche, recently reissued as a Penguin classic, restores some of the wonder to it. Just as Norman Maclean, with A River Runs Through It, sent me back to fishing, so Langewiesche (almost) makes me want to be a pilot.

Seeing double in a bar near Jaipur

Michael Kerr — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 10:57:11 +0000

The barmen in India, too, are a more reflective lot than their counterparts in London. These gentlemen were serving the drinks at Dera Amer, an elephant polo camp near the city of Jaipur.

An Indian show of security

Michael Kerr — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 10:39:39 +0000

Back from India, and settling down to write about a trip on the Maharajas’ Express, I find myself scribbling notes such as “add ref to tighter security”. But in India, as this photo shows, even a brush with the security guards can be part of the entertainment:

What has M&S got against travellers?

Michael Kerr — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:42:58 +0000

Does Marks & Spencer have something against the travelling public? If not, why does it charge them so much more when they buy their lunch at a station rather than in the high street?
When I buy a sandwich from Marks at lunchtime, it’s usually at a branch 10 minutes’ walk from the office, off Victoria Street in London. It was press day today, I was short of time and I popped into the branch at the station itself. Pasta with spinach, for which I usually pay £2, was £2.19; orange juice, usually £1, was £1.35; and a sandwich of salmon and soft cheese, usually £2.80, was £3.25. So the total, instead of £5.80, was £6.79. Now what would justify that?

Join the Navy – but not for a drink

Michael Kerr — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 19:58:41 +0000

Naval hospitality isn’t what it used to be. The London Evening Standard reports this evening that hundreds of Britons stranded by the closure of airports are being brought home from the Spanish port of Santander on the warship HMS Albion.

Commander Geoff Wintle told the paper: “It’s a warship, so they won’t be used to the austere conditions, but they will get fresh rations, fish and chips for dinner tonight and curry tomorrow . . . but it’s not a five-star hotel. There’s a dry policy on board, so there won’t be any drinking.”

Trawling the Telegraph archives for an anthology of our best writing on journeys by water, I’ve recently come across some reports of the Falklands War in 1982 by my old colleague Charlie Laurence. Charlie sailed for the islands on the Canberra, which was taken out of the cruising circuit to carry troops. In one of his early despatches, he writes: “Warrant officers and non-commissioned officers are allowed three spirit tots and unlimited beer; junior NCOs and other ranks, two cans of beer.” Even the hacks were trusted to have the occasional pint.

And that was when they were on their way to war.