How to Get Your Hotel or Restaurant in the Press: What Makes a Hospitality Story Newsworthy?
One of the questions I’m asked most often by hotels, restaurants and pubs is a simple one: what can we actually get PR coverage for? The answer is usually more than you think, but that doesn’t mean everything happening in your business is a news story.
I spend a lot of my working week looking at what’s happening within hospitality businesses and working out which bits journalists might be interested in. Sometimes the obvious story isn’t actually the strongest one. A new menu, for example, might be hugely important to the restaurant launching it, but on its own it probably isn’t going to persuade an editor to give up valuable space. The story behind the menu, the chef, the ingredients or the reason for the change might.
Over the past few weeks alone, my hospitality PR work has included a £2.6 million new opening, a hotel celebrating 60 years of family history, a 42km charity walk, award wins, a new walk-in wine cellar, new appointments and several restaurant and hospitality launches. They’re all completely different stories, they won’t all appeal to the same journalists and some need much more digging than others to find the angle that makes them interesting.
So, what actually makes a hotel, restaurant or pub story worth taking to the media?
Is a new hotel or restaurant opening newsworthy?
Usually, yes, but I still want to know what sits behind the announcement. If you’re investing significantly in a site, creating jobs, bringing an empty or historic building back into use or introducing something genuinely new to an area, there’s immediately more for a journalist to work with than simply “new restaurant opens”.
For one of my clients, Longbow Venues, I’ve been working on PR around Charleston, a new £2.6 million hospitality development in Bakewell which is creating around 60 jobs. Those figures matter because they tell us that this isn’t simply another place to eat. There’s an investment story, an employment story, a local business story and, because of its location in the Peak District, a tourism story too. Different parts of that story will appeal to different publications, which is why a good hospitality PR campaign looks for all of those possible routes rather than sending exactly the same pitch to everyone.
If you’re opening a new venue, I want to know the investment, the number of jobs being created, what was on the site previously, why you chose the location, who is behind the business, what you’re doing differently and what the opening says about the wider business. Somewhere amongst those answers there is usually a much stronger story than the opening announcement alone.
Is a new menu enough for a press story?
Sometimes, but generally I’d want to know more. What has changed and why? Is there an interesting chef behind it? Are you working with local producers? Is there an unusual ingredient, technique or concept? Does the menu reflect something happening more widely in food or hospitality? Is there a great personal story behind one of the dishes?
The same applies to a new afternoon tea, Sunday lunch or cocktail menu. The fact that it exists isn’t necessarily the story. Give me the reason somebody who doesn’t work for your business should care about it. That’s often where the PR angle is hiding.
This is also where knowing a business properly makes a difference. A client might tell me about a new menu and think that’s the story, but a conversation with the chef might uncover a local supplier, a childhood dish, an unusual ingredient or a completely different approach that gives us something much more interesting to work with.
Do hotel and restaurant anniversaries make good PR stories?
They can make brilliant ones, particularly when there are people, memories, photographs and a strong sense of place behind them. I’ve recently been working with Peak Edge Hotel on a story marking 60 years since the Red Lion was reopened by the father of the hotel’s current owner, Steve Perez. What makes that interesting isn’t simply the number 60. It’s six decades of local history, family connections, old photographs, weddings and celebrations and the opportunity to look at how the place has changed while still remaining important to the community around it.
Rather wonderfully, I have a personal connection to this particular story too: my own parents held their wedding reception at the Red Lion in 1980, as did other members of my family. Those are the details that bring an anniversary story to life. It stops being a corporate milestone and becomes a story about a place that has been part of people’s lives for generations.
If your hotel, restaurant or pub is approaching a significant anniversary, start looking through the archives. Speak to previous owners, long-standing members of staff and customers. Find the old menus and photographs. Ask people what they remember. There may be a much better story there than you realise.
Are awards worth publicising?
Yes, selectively. Winning a respected award or receiving significant industry recognition can absolutely be worth PR, particularly if it says something bigger about the business, but I wouldn’t recommend issuing a press release every time a certificate arrives.
I tend to look at the significance of the award, who has given it, how competitive it was, whether there’s a particularly strong category win and whether there is another story we can connect it to. A hotel receiving several major accolades over the course of a year, for example, can give us a wider story about its growth or increasing reputation rather than a succession of separate 'we won an award' announcements.
Awards are also useful long after the initial announcement. They become proof points when I’m pitching a hotel or restaurant for other features because they help demonstrate to a journalist that this is a business worth knowing about. Sometimes the award is the story. Sometimes it makes another story stronger.
What about something unusual within the hotel or restaurant?
This is where things can get particularly interesting. One of my favourite recent additions at a client property is the walk-in Sorrells wine cellar at Peak Edge Hotel. It gives us something tangible to talk about: the wine collection, the experience for guests, the Coravin selection and some rather special bottles. It’s much easier to interest a food, drink or travel journalist in something they can experience, photograph or discover than it is to tell them that a hotel has a great wine list.
Whenever I visit a client, I’m constantly looking around and asking questions. What’s new? What’s different? What are guests commenting on? What are you particularly proud of? What have you got that the hotel or restaurant down the road hasn’t? What do people stop and photograph? What do they ask the staff about?
Often, the client barely mentions the thing I find most interesting because they see it every day. That’s one of the useful things about having somebody from outside the business looking in. The feature you have stopped noticing might be exactly what catches a journalist’s attention.
Are charity and community stories good hospitality PR?
They can be, but there needs to be a genuine story behind them. Longbow Venues, for example, has a team taking on a 42km walk across the Peak District, travelling between its venues and raising money for local charities. That works because there’s a proper challenge involved, there are lots of local people taking part, there’s a fundraising target and the route itself connects the story directly to the area in which the business operates.
Community stories work best when the connection is real. A hospitality business is often a significant part of the place in which it operates: it employs local people, buys from local suppliers, welcomes visitors to the area and often has relationships with community organisations and charities that go back years. Those relationships can produce some lovely stories.
Journalists - and readers - can usually tell the difference between a business doing something worthwhile because it's close to their heart and company values and...a fairly thin attempt to manufacture some positive publicity. If you’re doing something because you really do care about it, that’s normally where I’d start.
Can you create a PR story when there isn’t an obvious one?
Absolutely. Not every PR story has to start with something that has already happened in the business. Sometimes you can create the story yourself, and some of the most successful campaigns I’ve worked on over the years have started with a slightly off the wall idea and the question: “What if we did this?”
I’ve organised for a world-record-breaking speed eater to take on a giant Bakewell tart, generating media coverage as well as putting the business in front of her millions of social media followers. I’ve persuaded famous chefs and broadcast journalists to create their own Christmas mince pies, which were then auctioned for charity and generated coverage across breakfast television, radio and other media. For a new rollercoaster launch, we put heart-rate monitors on TV presenters to measure exactly what happened to them as they rode it. For the launch of a children’s driving attraction, we turned the idea around and interviewed children about their parents’ driving habits instead (absolutely hillarious by the way and the media loved it!)
Food gives you plenty of opportunities to have some fun too. I’ve generated international viral coverage by challenging people to finish the world's hottest pizza, created special honey-themed and beef-themed dinner events and, on one memorable occasion, dressed as the Mad Hatter to draw attention to a rabbit pizza. There are plenty more where those came from.
Some of those ideas sound completely bonkers when you write them down, but there was a reason behind every one. They gave journalists something to photograph, film, try, talk about or invite somebody onto air to discuss. They also gave the public something they might actually want to share. The super hot pizza wasn't simply a menu announcement; it was a challenge. Putting heart-rate monitors on people riding a rollercoaster created a question we could answer - and gave the presenters something unique to share with viewers. Asking children to critique their parents’ driving turned a new attraction into something funny and relatable.
The best PR stunts also work beyond traditional media. The giant Bakewell tart challenge, for example, wasn't valuable solely because journalists covered it. Bringing in somebody with a huge existing social audience meant the story reached millions of people directly as well. That combination of earned media, social reach, video, photography and content for the business’s own channels can make a well-planned event or stunt work very hard.
That doesn't mean every hotel or restaurant needs to start making enormous puddings or searching the costume cupboard. A stunt for the sake of a stunt can fall horribly flat. The idea still needs to have a clear connection to the business, product, place or audience, and ideally you should be able to explain the story in one sentence. If it takes five minutes to explain why you're doing it, it's probably not the idea.
But if you’re sitting there thinking, “We don’t really have any news at the moment”, that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s nothing we can do. Sometimes my job is to find the story that already exists. Sometimes it’s to help create one.
Is a new member of staff a news story?
A senior appointment can be, particularly for hospitality trade and regional business media, but again I look for the story beyond the job title. Where have they come from? What experience do they bring? Why have they joined? What are they planning to change or introduce? Is their appointment part of a wider period of investment or growth?
For consumer-facing media, sometimes the person themselves is much more interesting than the appointment. A chef with an unusual background, a sommelier with a brilliant story or a long-serving member of staff who knows every regular by name could potentially make a much more engaging feature than a traditional appointment announcement.
Hospitality is a people business and some of its best PR stories are about people too. It’s very easy to focus on buildings, bedrooms, menus and investment and overlook the personalities that actually make a place what it is.
How do you know whether something is actually newsworthy?
There are a handful of questions I automatically start asking when a client tells me something new. Why now? What is different? Who does this affect? Are there good numbers behind it? Is there a strong local connection? Is there a person at the heart of the story? Can we photograph it? And would somebody with absolutely no connection to the business find it interesting?
That final question is probably the most useful. It’s very easy to become immersed in your own business and assume everybody else will be as excited as you are about what’s happening inside it. You might have spent six months working on a project, so of course it feels enormously important to you. A journalist is looking at it from the reader’s point of view. My job is to do the same and work out which part of what you’ve done will matter to somebody outside the business.
Sometimes that means telling a client that something probably isn’t a media story. I’d much rather do that than send journalists weak stories for the sake of being seen to send out press releases. Maintaining good media relationships means knowing when you’ve genuinely got something worth putting in somebody’s inbox.
Does PR coverage keep working after it has been published?
Absolutely, and this is something I think businesses sometimes underestimate when they’re looking at the value of PR. Securing a piece of national coverage isn’t necessarily the end of that story. Across my hospitality clients, we’ve secured coverage in publications including The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent and many others, and those articles can remain online, searchable and discoverable for a very long time.
They can also come back to life. I saw a great example of this recently with Losehill House Hotel. The hotel had been included in a national Independent feature originally published in April. Months later, the article appeared again, tweaked and updated for autumn. The work that went into securing that opportunity in the first place was suddenly delivering another round of exposure for the hotel without us having to start again from scratch.
This is actually very common, particularly in travel and lifestyle journalism. Publishers revisit existing features, update recommendations, change seasonal introductions and republish articles when they become relevant again. A piece about spring breaks can become an autumn escape feature. A hotel recommendation can reappear in another version of a destination guide. Existing articles can also surface again through search, newsletters and social media long after the date they were first published.
It’s one of the reasons online PR coverage has become so valuable. A print article traditionally had a very obvious lifespan: you bought the newspaper or magazine, read it and eventually recycled it. Online coverage can continue appearing in searches, be shared, linked to and rediscovered months or years later. It also gives the hotel or restaurant something valuable to use itself. A strong piece of national coverage can be shared through social media and newsletters, linked to from the website and used as independent evidence of the reputation the business has built.
There’s another reason that digital footprint is becoming increasingly important. People no longer discover hotels and restaurants solely by typing a few words into Google. They’re also asking ChatGPT and other AI tools where to stay, where to eat and which places are worth visiting. Nobody can promise that securing a particular piece of PR coverage will result in a business appearing in an AI-generated answer, and I’d be very wary of anyone who did. What we can do is build a strong body of credible, independent information about a business across trusted publications, alongside the content on its own website.
That’s why I don’t judge the value of a piece of coverage purely by what happens on publication day. Good online PR creates a lasting digital footprint, and some of the best coverage I’ve secured for clients has continued earning its keep long after we first celebrated seeing it go live.
You don’t need to wait for a huge announcement
Some of the best hospitality PR doesn’t begin with a major launch or a multi-million-pound investment. It starts with a conversation.
I regularly find stories while chatting to clients about what they’ve been doing, what guests have been saying, where they’ve invested, who has joined the team, what the chef has been working on or what’s coming up over the next few months. Something mentioned almost in passing can turn out to be exactly the thing I want to pitch.
That’s one of the reasons I think hospitality PR works best when your PR person really gets to know the business rather than simply waiting for you to send them a press release idea. The more I understand a property, its people, its history, its customers and what it’s trying to achieve, the easier it becomes to recognise those stories when they appear.
There are probably stories sitting inside your hotel, restaurant or pub right now. You just need to know which ones are worth telling.
Feather & Fern PR provides hospitality PR and communications support for hotels, restaurants, pubs, venues and food and drink businesses, working with clients across the UK and beyond. If you’ve got plenty happening in your business but aren’t sure what journalists will actually be interested in, get in touch.
