How To Contact Tourism Boards For Travel Blogging Sponsorships

Wondering how to contact tourism boards and find travel blogging sponsorships? Looking for a travel sponsorship proposal template? Then read this blog…

Of late I’ve been fielding questions from bloggers and non-bloggers alike about how to contact and work with tourism boards, and how to find travel blogging sponsorships.

But before I tell them how it’s important to tell them the following few things:

1. Tourism boards are the government organisations responsible for the tourism of a particular town, or a country. A city may have its tourism board, eg. Zurich city has the Zurich Tourism Board, despite the country, Switzerland, having one — Switzerland Tourism Board.
2. Tourism boards hire travel bloggers and influencers to promote their region.
3. For a travel blogger, working with a Tourism Board is as much an achievement as playing in the national team for a sportsman. The more you have worked with tourism boards, the more successful you will be considered as a travel blogger.
4. Media Trips organised by Tourism Boards are called FAM trips, or Familiarization trips.

Useful: if you haven’t started a blog yet and are thinking of starting one, here’s a detailed travel blog I have written on How To Start A Travel Blog In India.

How To Work With Tourism Boards

If you’ve just started blogging and are wondering if your profile is strong enough for a tourism board to sponsor you, and whether you should contact tourism boards or not, remember that there’s no ‘magic number’, that, when crossed, makes you eligible to work with a tourism board. As long as you send the right pitch to the right tourism board at the right time, you should be fine.

However, one parameter to find out whether or not you’re worthy of getting travel sponsorships is an honest review of your channel. As a travel blogger, you’re working as the marketing channel for your sponsors — whether it’s a tourism board or something else. So ask yourself, very honestly, can you offer your sponsors a good promotion? Do you have enough followers for a tourism board to hire you? Do people engage on your Facebook and Instagram posts, showing their interest in following your journey? Do you get comments on your blog posts?… and so on!

When contacting tourism boards and sponsors, you should be able to prove that you have an engaging audience, regardless of how big it is.

How To Contact Tourism Boards

Speaking of the best practices, for increasing your chances of getting sponsorships as a travel blogger, this is what I advise my fellow bloggers while approaching and contacting tourism boards for travel blogging sponsorships…

Create A Media Kit For Your Channels

Just like a Resume helps an employer quickly analyse the job-seeker’s core strengths, a Media Kit helps a tourism board understand the blogger. A Media Kit talks about your blog (and other channels like Youtube and Instagram) in detail — right from what kind of stories it covers to the total readership it entertains to all its previous sponsors.

Creating a media kit looks practical and professional, and thus increases your chance of getting a reply from the sponsors you’re writing to. So while emailing tourism boards, always attach a Media Kit. Another reason for providing them with a Media Kit is that if no FAM trips’re happening at the moment, Tourism Boards can keep your Media Kit handy for any future possibility. Read: How To Create A Media Kit For Your Blog

Rather than sending a 500-word long email, keep your email crisp and attach all required information about you and your blog in your Media Kit. A Media Kit is the most important thing in your email when you contact tourism boards for travel blogging sponsorships.

Find Relevant Email Address For Tourism Boards

One of the biggest problems when it comes to contacting tourism boards is finding the relevant email address of the person responsible for handling PR or looking after media queries.

Most countries, or prominent cities in the world (like Paris or Amsterdam or Goa) where tourism is big, have a dedicated tourism board website. This includes developed nations like Australia, the USA, and Japan, among others. Finding the email address of the person responsible for handling media requests for those countries isn’t a problem. The problem, however, persists while searching for contacts in Asian markets or other developing nations where the confusion is prevalent — for example, countries like India, the Philippines, Cambodia, etc.

Speaking of my experiences of finding relevant tourism board contacts in India, we don’t have a dedicated website for country tourism. Moreover, only a handful of states have a tourism board (and a dedicated website where you can find contact details of the working officials) including Rajasthan, Gujarat, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala, and Madhya Pradesh, among a few others.

Tips for finding relevant contact details if you can’t find them online:

• Write a message on theTwitter & Facebook handles of the tourism boards and ask them for a relevant email.
• Ask other travel bloggers in your network.

Contact PR Firms

I’ve recently noticed that many tourism boards that do not have a relevant tourism board website, handle their marketing operations through a PR agency. Many state tourism boards in India, for example, have a PR agency hired that looks after their marketing operations. Even many country tourism boards I’ve recently worked with got in touch with me via a PR agency in India.

So Google for the PR agencies in your country and do some cold emailing. Introducing yourself and what you do and leave them with your Media Kit, for whenever they will next have some relevant work for you.

Write An Effective Email To Tourism Boards

Now that you have prepared a Media Kit, found a few correct email addresses to be contacted and have vaguely understood how to contact tourism boards for travel blogging sponsorships, what next? Writing an effective email. And this includes…

• Introduce yourself in brief: Write a bit about yourself and your blog (no more than a paragraph). Include statistics on your blog or any other magazine you write for. Leave it to the Media Kit to talk about it all in detail.
• Be clear with your request: Now that you’ve introduced yourself in the first couple of paragraphs, tell them what you’re looking for. Are you looking for a full-board FAM trip with an entire itinerary set for you in addition to flight tickets from your home country? Or are you already travelling to the destination and are open to any opportunities — free accommodation, free city tours, etc (Tip: During your initial few sponsorships, it’s always a good idea to ask for ‘anything possible’. Put your demands forwards only once you’ve worked with a few sponsors).
• Be clear about what you can offer: How many blog posts you will be writing after the trip? What kind of engagement on social media can you offer? Will you be helping your sponsors promote a hashtag too? Can you promise any rough figure of the total reach they can expect?

How To Find Travel Blogging Sponsorships: Conclusion

As I said earlier, Tourism Boards are always in search of travel bloggers, and it doesn’t matter how immature your blog is, there is always a Tourism Board, out there, waiting for you. The only difference is — with increasing popularity and reach, you’re going to get more.

When I initially started blogging, every time I found other bloggers posting on Facebook about their sponsored trips with a state/country Tourism Board, I always thought that it would take at least a few years, and a few dozen thousand Facebook likes, to persuade a Tourism Board for sponsoring my trip. But I was wrong!

Though you indeed need to build a good presence as a travel blogger and gain a few thousand social media followers before you start scoring FAM trips, it’s still not impossible to get one during your initial months of blogging — just be prepared to not get many privileges as an experienced blogger may otherwise do on a similar trip. And one of the privileges may mean that the experienced blogger may just be getting paid as well, while you aren’t! But that doesn’t matter because as you slowly gain experience, you slowly become that (privileged) blogger too!

And as I say always, blogging isn’t as easy as many think. It requires long working hours, enough dedication and a lot of time to slowly get there!

I hope you found this article on how to find travel blogging sponsorships and how to work with tourism boards. If you have any questions, you can always write them in the comments below, or contact me personally on my Instagram page (username: FOOTLOOSE DEV).