TOP TIPS TO SURVIVE A TRICKY PR PROJECT ABROAD

As it’s the run up to holiday season, we’re running a series of blogs all about our travels and adventures, whether for work or pleasure.

One of the things that first attracted me to Brazen was the chance to work on some great travel PR clients, as one of my biggest ambitions was always to travel for work. I love my holidays and travel to new places, but what could be better than getting paid to explore the world on work time?!

Over the years I’ve been lucky enough to visit picturesque Lake Garda, travel around France and also fly to some less exotic destinations.. Bielefeld, Belgium and Norwich anyone?!

One of the most ambitious travel PR campaigns we worked on was organising family holidays for a number of competition winners who we accompanied to France, capturing their experiences on video with daily interviews and organised activities.

This was an ambitious project for a number of reasons – tight timescales, budgets and kids who didn’t particularly want to be filmed or chat to us on schedule. So here’s my top tips for how to survive a tricky PR project abroad:

• Have back up plans for your back up plans. We didn’t know that one of the kids was scared of heights when we tried to encourage them to get on a zipline or that one couldn’t swim as we tried to get them into the waterpark
• Take more team members. We walked miles and miles every single day. Our videographer lost over a stone while we were away due to the distance covered. It would have helped us massively to have a few more people in different places helping to tee up the next part of the shoot while we finished other bits and sourced props etc
• It’s not always possible to do a recce when you’re working on a travel PR campaign in a different country, but try to build at least a day into the schedule when you can walk through the activity and plan contingencies
• Budget for extra props and theming. Working with holiday companies will mean that apartments and villas won’t necessarily have the finishing touches to make it look like a genuine holiday or experience – inflatables, beach towels, flip flops were sourced abroad and added to the scenes
• Make sure you have time for a debrief with your clients at the end of the day over a bottle of wine (or two!). As we were in France, the wine was cheap and tasted amazing and was a great way to regroup and wind down at the end of the day

We’ve worked on so many amazing travel PR and destination marketing campaigns over the years that it’s hard to pick out some favourites but that trip to France was definitely up there as one of the most fun and memorable!

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