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What Public Relations Is and
What It Can Do for You
A former travel editor and public-relations counsel for the Hyatt Corporation hotels, Peter Celliers, once said that "there are many misconceptions about public relations. One of the most widespread is that it's easy. And it is-it's as easy as painting the Sistine Ceiling if you're Michelangelo. Public relations can be as simple as a smile on the face of a room clerk or as complex as a bridge master's tournament. But in the final analysis, public relations is just targeted cornmunications.t'!
Your establishment has public relations whether it recognizes it or not. Hotels and restaurants relate with numerous publics (groups of people). These may include
-guests or customers
--employees
-community opinion leaders and other residents
-the traveling public, business and leisure travelers who
are potential guests or customers -the general public
-the media
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-suppliers
-other segments of the travel or food-service industries
(travel agents and restaurant guide publishers, for example)
-shareholders, if your hotel or restaurant is owned or operated by a publicly held corporation
-corporate officers (same as above).
Public relations should be part of an overall marketing communications program. The program at an independent property encompasses only that hotel or restaurant. If the establishment belongs to a system, its efforts must dovetail with the organization's overall corporate communications.
In either case, such a program might consist of
• public relations,
• advertising,
• internal communications, and
• sales promotion. _
Public relations has been called an oft-misunderstood calling, craft, or process. Thus it may be helpful at the outset to examine what public relations is and is not.
Some otherwise knowledgeable hospitality executives frequently confuse public relations with publicity-one of its tools. Still others see no difference between public relations and advertising. Chapter 4 goes into detail about what separates advertising from public relations.
To clear up any misconceptions, perhaps it would be most useful to start by setting forth what public relations is not.
First, public relations is not a cure-all for the ills and problerns that confront hotels, restaurants, and their executives.
One of the most common misunderstandings of public relations is that it is a kind of black magic that will make people think favorably of a hospitality organization whether such