For the owners of Thai luxury hotel group the Banyan Tree, employing the Countess of Wessex's R-JH public relations firm could not have backfired more spectacularly.
Murray Harkin, Sophie Wessex's former business partner, was at the centre of controversy after he allegedly offered to find a News of the World reporter posing as a sheikh a 'discreet villa' at the Phuket hotel and young boys. Doubtless, it was not the kind of offer the Banyan Tree would have made or the kind of publicity it would have wished.
As Sophie told the fake sheikh: 'If anybody gets some kind of additional profile or benefit from being involved with us because of my situation, that's an unspoken benefit.' And no doubt that was the unspoken benefit the Banyan Tree was after.
There are hundreds of travel PR companies in the UK to choose from. Why choose R-JH, whose only travel experience was publicising the Lanesborough Hotel in Hyde Park? The Lanesborough, being owned by an American company, was no doubt impressed by the royal association.
The main reason for using a PR company is to get journalists to write about your products (editorial gets a much bigger response than anything from an advertisement). A good PR company is your lifeline to the journalists you need to know and ultimately the publications you want to see your hotel splashed in. Throwing champagne parties filled with pretty people, as Harkin suggested, does not get you on the travel pages.
But Sophie doesn't know many travel journalists. In 11 years as a travel journalist, I cannot recall ever seeing a press release from her company (and if I did it must have been so unnewsworthy it failed to register on my brain). Nor have any of Sophie's minions ever called with a story.
Except for a small incident almost two years ago when I was working at the Times . An eminent hotel PR phoned the travel editor asking if she'd like to join him and a friend, Sophie Wessex, for lunch_
The travel editor in question rarely lunched. But she was tempted out by the carrot of meeting royalty. Sophie dutifully turned up at the restaurant, smiled and met the travel editor. But it was her handsome bodyguard, rather than Sophie, whowas the talk of the office afterwards. The sad thing is that Sophie was too embarrassed, or inhibited, to ring travel editors herself. While she has used her name to get clients, she has been afraid of the journalists she needs to know to get her clients the column inches.
It is believed that the Banyan Tree was planning to pay R-JH £5,000 a month - well above the average for the size of the account. According to several travel PR companies, a normal figure is between £2,000 and £3,000 - which just shows how much extra naive companies will pay for a royal connection. 'You cannot assume because you have a royal on board, you get colour page spreads,' said another PR.
Hotel PR companies are shocked and let down by R-JH's behaviour and the bad name it has given their trade.
Ann Sadler, the PR representative for Elegant Resorts, CV Travel, the new Villa Nova in Barbados and Byblos Hotels in St Tropez and Courchevel, and a pro in the luxury hotel field describes what her job entails. She says: 'When I take on a client such as Byblos, I firstly write to key travel journalists introducing them to the hotel. You need to proclaim you are doing it in case the magazine or newspaper has a feature coming up on that area or they need pictures. I then try to get high-profile writers to review it on a professional basis. I will also organise one or two escorted trips for journalists a year.'
She also contacts lifestyle and interiors magazines who might want to do a shoot at the hotel and contacts restaurant magazines about interviewing the hotel chef or finding a food angle. She visits hotels she promotes before publicising them so that she can talk about them to journalists first-hand.
Some of the less slick hotel PRs use the bombardment approach: hundreds of press releases announcing non-existent news followed up by a phone call asking: 'Did you get my press release?' A phrase the countess may never reach for again, havingstepped down from her PR post.
