Turning member events into national travel-press inches.

The challenge

• 410 tourism partners across whisky, walking, food and accommodation, with brilliant seasonal stories no one outside Scotland heard about.
• Press contact list was a six-year-old spreadsheet inherited from a former agency, with 60% bounce rates on first send.
• Travel-desk pitching was reactive and ad-hoc, usually triggered by an angry partner email about a competitor's coverage.
• No way to credit individual partner contributions when reporting back to the board on press performance.

The approach

• Rebuilt the media list from scratch using the Press Pilot journalist database, filtered to UK travel desks active in the last 90 days.
• Segmented partners into seasonal beats (spring walking, autumn food, winter whisky) and scheduled pitch campaigns against each.
• Used AI drafting to weave three or four partner submissions into single thematic releases with multiple voices and locations.
• Tagged every piece of coverage to a named partner so quarterly board reports could show direct attribution.

The results

• Tier-1 national travel coverage rose 3.0× across two quarters, including The Times, The Guardian and Condé Nast Traveller.
• Pitch-to-coverage conversion settled at 23%, well above the team's previous benchmark of around 8%.
• Eleven partners were directly quoted in national press for the first time, two of them small independent operators.
• Funding partners renewed marketing contributions early, citing the visibility uplift as the single biggest factor.