Guests don’t only find hotels on hotel websites. They find them in a travel editor’s roundup, a local news story, a Reddit thread, and, more and more often, in an answer from ChatGPT or Google’s AI Mode. So when someone asks where to stay, it’s fair to ask whose voice is doing the recommending.
For most hotels, the honest answer is “not ours.” A hotel can control its website, its ads, and its social channels. It can’t control what a journalist writes, what a guide recommends, or which sources an AI tool trusts. Digital PR is how a hotel gets a say in those conversations.
Yes, we do PR now. No, we won’t be sending out a press release to announce it. Digital PR is the newest service at three&six, and over the next three articles we’ll show you how it works. This one covers what digital PR is, how it’s different from the hotel PR you already know, and why it deserves a place in your marketing plan. Part two gets into digital PR and AI search. Part three takes you behind the scenes of a campaign.
What Is Digital PR?
Digital PR means building stories journalists want to cover, then pitching them to the online publications your guests read. The goal is coverage that links back to your website and puts your hotel’s name in front of people who are planning a trip.
Nobody has ever booked a room because of a press release titled “Hotel Announces New Pillow Menu.” So we don’t write those. A digital PR story has a hook: new data, a timely angle, or an expert view that a journalist can build an article around. The hotel is part of the story because it has something useful to say, and the link back to its website comes with that.
Every digital PR campaign is built to produce two things:
- Coverage in publications your guests trust, such as travel titles, design and lifestyle outlets, trade press, and local news.
- Backlinks from those publications to your website, which help search engines judge your site as credible.
Both can be tracked and reported, which is a large part of why digital PR sits so comfortably next to social, SEO and paid media.
Why Hotels Are a Strong Fit for Digital PR
Some businesses struggle to find anything a journalist would care about. Hotels rarely have that problem. Travel editors need hotels to fill roundups, guides, and features, and most properties have more angles than they realize:
- Place. A hotel knows its neighborhood better than almost anyone. That makes it a credible source for local guides, seasonal stories, and “where to stay” features.
- Heritage and design. Historic buildings, restorations, and distinctive interiors give design and architecture writers something to cover.
- Data. Booking patterns, guest behavior, and seasonal demand can become original research that journalists cite.
- People. General managers, chefs, and designers can offer expert commentary on travel, hospitality, and food.
- Timing. Events, holidays, and seasonal moments give a story a reason to run this week rather than someday.
The challenge is rarely a shortage of stories. It’s finding the right one, checking it, and getting it in front of the right journalist at the right time.
Digital PR vs Traditional Hotel PR
Plenty of hotels already work with a PR agency, and digital PR isn’t there to replace it. The two do different jobs.
| Traditional Hotel PR | Digital PR at three&six | |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | Ongoing media relationships, openings, launches, events, and reputation | One story per campaign, built to win online coverage and links |
| Starting point | The hotel’s news and calendar | Research and data, matched to what journalists are covering |
| Where coverage appears | Print, broadcast, and online | Online publications with links back to your site |
| How success is measured | Mentions, reach, and relationships | Coverage, backlinks, referral traffic, and AI citations |
| How it connects | Often separate from search and paid media | Reported next to your SEO and AI visibility data |
Traditional hotel PR is broad and relationship-led. Digital PR is narrower by design. Each campaign is built around a single story, backed by research, and pitched to a short list of publications that fit. When a hotel has a PR team, the two can work side by side, and a strong digital PR campaign can give the wider PR effort extra material to work with.
The SEO and Social Case for Digital PR
Links from authoritative publications are still one of the factors Google uses to decide which sites deserve to rank. Hotel websites rarely attract those links on their own. Your rooms page is lovely. No journalist is linking to it.
A good story gives editors a reason to link. That authority flows through the whole site, which can help the pages that drive direct bookings hold their own against the OTAs. For a hotel competing with Expedia and Booking.com for its own brand and destination searches, credible links help.
It’s also a cleaner route than buying links. Google’s spam policies treat links bought for ranking purposes as a risk, while a link from a publication that chose to cover your story is an editorial link, the kind search engines tend to reward. Relevance helps too. A link from a respected travel title or a local news site that covers your city is likely to carry more weight for a hotel than one from an unrelated directory.
Coverage pays off on social, too. A feature in a respected publication is third-party proof your own posts can’t manufacture, and it gives your social team something to share, quote, and turn into content that says “don’t take our word for it.” Publications often share their stories with their own followers as well, which puts your hotel in front of people who don’t follow you yet.
Social and search are also more connected than they used to be. Social posts don’t directly lift your Google rankings, but social content now shows up in search results, and Google Search Console can now track social content. A story that gets people talking on social can send more of them searching for your hotel by name. We dig into how the two work together in Can Social Media Help Your SEO?
Digital PR Beyond the Link
Links are the most measurable part of digital PR, but coverage does more than that.
It reaches guests while they’re planning. A feature in a travel publication puts your hotel in front of readers who are already thinking about where to go.
It gives your other teams something to use. Sales teams can share coverage with group and corporate clients. Social teams get credible, third-party content to post. Your website can carry an “as featured in” section.
It can lift brand searches. When more people read about a hotel, more of them may search for it by name, and branded searches tend to be some of the most valuable traffic a hotel site gets.
It feeds AI search. Coverage adds to the record of independent sources that AI tools draw on when they recommend somewhere to stay. That’s a big enough topic that it gets its own article: part two of this series.
What Digital PR Isn’t
Because “PR” covers so much ground, it helps to be clear about what our digital PR service doesn’t do.
- It isn’t a press release blast. We don’t send generic announcements to large lists and hope something sticks.
- It isn’t paid placement. We don’t buy advertorials or sponsored links. The value of digital PR comes from coverage a publication chose to run.
- It isn’t guaranteed coverage. No one can promise a journalist will run a story, and we won’t pretend to. What we can do is give each story the best chance by researching it properly and pitching it to the right people.
How Digital PR Fits With the Rest of Your Marketing
three&six already runs SEO, AI visibility, paid search, social media, content marketing, and CRO for hotels. Digital PR plugs into all of it:
- Coverage builds the authority that helps organic rankings.
- Citations in trusted publications feed AI visibility.
- Content made for a campaign can live on in your blog, newsletters, and social channels.
- Visitors from coverage can join your remarketing audiences, so paid search and social ads can follow up.
- Referral traffic from coverage lands on a website we already understand and track, and our CRO work helps more of it convert.
That’s the upside of running digital PR with the team that already knows your numbers. Every campaign is aimed at the same goal as everything else we do: more direct bookings.
Our Digital PR Packages
We offer two packages, and hotels can take one or both.
Digital PR Campaigns. A research-led campaign built around one strong story for your hotel. It includes story ideation, a sourced research backgrounder, the content written in your hotel’s tone of voice, targeted outreach to verified publications, and reporting on coverage, links, and AI citations. Part three of this series walks through how a campaign runs.
AI Citation Outreach. A focused service that looks at the sources AI tools already cite for the searches your guests make, finds where your hotel is missing or described inaccurately, and reaches out to fix it. Part two covers how AI citation outreach works.
Let’s Talk Digital PR
If you’d like to discuss our digital PR packages, get in touch. We’ll look at your property, tell you honestly where the stories are, and recommend the package that fits.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do we need a PR agency already to use digital PR?
No, Digital PR works on its own. If you do have a PR agency, we’ll coordinate with them so the two efforts support each other.
Can you guarantee coverage?
No one can guarantee coverage, because journalists decide what they publish. We give each story the best chance by grounding it in research, matching it to publications that run that kind of story, and pitching it at the right time.
How do you measure digital PR?
We track coverage, backlinks, referral traffic, and AI citations, and report them next to the SEO and AI visibility data we already share with our clients. That way digital PR is judged on the same numbers as the rest of your marketing.
Is digital PR right for independent hotels or hotel groups?
Both. Independent hotels tend to have distinctive stories, such as a historic building, a strong neighborhood identity, or a well-known chef. Hotel groups bring something different: scale. Booking data from across a portfolio can become original research journalists want to cite, and a single campaign can feature several properties, so the coverage and links reach more than one website. We’ll build the campaign around whichever you are.