Pooling Budgets, Maximising Impact: Smarter PR Strategies for Tourist Boards

Slow travel – a more sustainable, meaningful, and deeper way to explore – has moved beyond the trend phase and become the norm (with 81% of travellers now seeking slow travel experiences).

This is great news for DMOs and Tourist Boards: longer trips mean more revenue spent locally, and fewer flights mean a lighter environmental footprint. But while this trend brings more local spending, it also means fewer trips overall, leaving DMOs competing for a shrinking pool of visitors. With lower volumes come lower budgets.

The choice now being, scale back to match demand, or sharpen up to capture audiences seeking longer, deeper experiences.

Smaller DMOs feel budget constraints more acutely than larger destinations. One-off PR efforts often struggle to break through mainstream media noise. But what if a group of DMOs pooled their budgets to create a multi-destination, values-aligned campaign, attracting travellers to explore for longer?

It isn’t only shifting travel behaviours driving change. The cost of living crisis, fewer working journalists, and the wider shake-up in how media is commissioned and consumed all add pressure to DMO budgets. Traditional press trips and one-off campaigns are harder to justify and harder to get covered. To stay visible, destinations need to rethink how they approach PR, and collaboration offers a smarter, more sustainable way forward.

That’s the premise we’ll explore here: how all sizes of DMOs unlock the marketing power of much larger organisations and create high-value productions that rival (or even outdo) the big players.

At first glance, collaborating with competitors and pooling PR budgets sounds risky. Until you consider the alternative: fragmented, low-impact stories that disappear into the media noise.

Small-scale PR can nudge the needle, but it rarely tips the scales. By contrast, a coordinated, well-funded, multi-organisation campaign has a far greater chance of making waves, especially when supported by professional PR teams with strong assets.

With fewer journeys happening, cutting through and staying relevant is priority number one. Go big or go home – and your audience would agree.

DMOs today are more than promoters of place, they are stewards of place. Their role extends beyond generating headlines to fostering community engagement, safeguarding cultural and natural assets, and shaping a destination’s long-term reputation. 

That means it’s not just about getting visitors in the door or securing a single article about the local architecture; it’s about managing who comes, how they experience the destination, and ensuring tourism benefits both people and place. Pooling budgets, then, is only part of the picture: what’s really needed is a shared mindset among DMOs that prioritises responsible, collaborative destination stewardship.

Travellers want longer trips in one region, rather than lots of short breaks. They want depth over breadth: to immerse themselves, explore edges, and discover local culture.

This is what travellers seek now: deeper, more embedded experiences. Longer visits, fewer flights. A trip of a lifetime, not just a week in an all-inclusive.

For instance, a traveller choosing a joint itinerary across Devon and Cornwall can combine coastlines, food traditions, and heritage sites in one seamless trip, something far richer than either alone could offer.

By collaborating with neighbouring DMOs, you move beyond selling a single stop and instead present visitors with a complete regional experience.

Shared investment means more reach. Combined budgets open the door to higher production values, stronger events, and broader media buys.

Equally important, cohesive regional storytelling creates richer narratives for travel media. Imagine hiking across the Scottish Highlands, moving from village to village; each location adding a layer of story – food, heritage, and adventure – into one compelling press trip.

These are the kinds of tales that spark journalists’ imaginations and inspire travellers. Alone, a small DMO can’t deliver this scale. Together, they can.

Joint press trips, shared assets, group media lists, and influencer partnerships, economies of scale in action.

Pooling resources doesn’t just save money, it also reduces carbon impact. One well-organised press trip can generate multiple pieces of coverage across publications, without flying out several separate groups with different agencies. That means fewer flights, less duplication, and a lighter footprint overall; great for the pocket, and even better for the planet.

Start by identifying destinations to work with. Geography matters, but thematic fit, audience overlap, and shared goals are often more important.

From the ciders of Dorset, to the fudges of Devon, to the pasties of Cornwall. From the slopes of Alpe d’Huez to the glacier trails of Les Deux Alpes, complementing each other creates a package no single destination could offer.

Once you’ve found potential partners, you need to plan, structure, and govern the project. You’ll need to manage pooled budgets carefully, and equitably. And all this will need oversight.

Using a PR agency to be the middle person, to give that oversight, and to manage all of the relationships is a huge benefit. It means less organisation and less friction for DMOs. It gives one point of contact for everyone – including the journalists – and one itinerary.

It means that budgets are treated equitably and fairly, without leaning on one organisation to bankroll the whole thing, or ask too much of the smaller DMO.

Working together with your partner DMO and PR team, you’ll need to nail down your themes; ones that are relevant but also one that’ll have the most impact and resonance with media and audiences.

The key is to show how different destinations can complement each other under a shared theme. When Lausanne and Basel partnered for a bespoke group press trip, the focus wasn’t on comparing their similarities, but on highlighting how wine in Lausanne and chocolate in Basel together created a compelling culinary journey. By framing them under one unifying theme rather than forcing direct comparisons, each destination retained its distinct identity while contributing to a stronger, more appealing overall story, as highlighted by Sarah Rodrigues at The Independent.

This approach also works for hotels: collaborating on joint press trips reduces costs and still results in separate articles.

What’s the mix of joint press visits, co-branded editorial pitches, collaborative digital platforms and social media campaigns going to be? Outline a multi-channel plan, showing each partners’ role within it. Again, a PR agency well-versed in planning and comms is your best bet for this.

Define your KPIs (media hits, social engagement, bookings) and track them, both collectively and per destination, so you can see how much impact it’s had regionally and individually.

Collaboration inevitably comes with risks: brand dilution, conflicting priorities, or uneven effort among partners. But many of these risks can be mitigated when destinations take the time to align not just on budgets and campaigns, but on long-term goals. This is where stewardship comes in. A successful partnership isn’t only about attracting more visitors in the short term, it’s about building a shared vision for how tourism should develop across a region.

For example, if a ski destination partners with another Alpine resort, the collaboration will be strongest if both are also investing in summer tourism, developing cycling routes, hiking trails, or wellness experiences. In that way, the campaign supports not only seasonal visitor numbers but the long-term sustainability of both destinations.

Mitigating risks means setting clear agreements, roles, and exit clauses, but it also means ensuring that all partners see the bigger picture: tourism that benefits communities, protects the environment, and builds a resilient reputation. When destinations align on these broader stewardship goals, collaboration shifts from a tactical PR play into a long-term investment in place, one that pays back year after year.