Travel and Tourism Public Relations

Citation

Donohue, R. (2007), "Travel and Tourism Public Relations", International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Vol. 19 No. 1, pp. 96-97. https://doi.org/10.1108/09596110710724251

This handy‐size volume is aimed mainly at undergraduate travel and tourism majors and hospitality managers. It introduces the overall practice of public relations and examines how the PR job is being accomplished in four major sectors of the travel and tourism industry. The author devotes most of the book (four chapters) to PR practices in those four sectors – hotels, restaurants, transportation, and destination/tourist attractions. The volume closes with advice for employers and prospective employees, appendices of useful lists, and an index.

Primary strengths of the book are its reader‐friendly style and practical treatment of PR for the industry. The book builds on responsible research and, in the most part, provides recent data. An especially welcome feature is the provision of 17 grey‐screened “sidebars” illustrating chapter concepts in practice. If anything in the book is controversial, it may be the author's dislike of the trend toward coordination of marketing and public relations in the emerging functional area of integrated marketing communications. For commercial enterprises, isn't such integration understandable and an improvement over the functional communication silos of yesteryear?

Travel and Tourism Public Relation is to be recommended as an interesting and practical guide for managers and entry‐level practitioners. For scholarly use, the book's theoretical framework is just adequate, but the book could serve very well as supplemental text for general public relations courses in the US university system. In other systems, such as three‐year polytechnic institutions training entry‐level practitioners for travel and tourism industries, this could be the only PR reading required.