The Press Trip – Literary England

Our Chinese travel PR work includes building networks and seeding story ideas with the Chinese travel media. Guanxi discussed ideas with one of the major state owned travel consumer magazines in China for a piece about the literary heroes of the South of England. The journalist, Mr Huang, was originally most interested in visiting the house of Agatha Christie, Greenway in Devon, but we took the opportunity to introduce him to some of the other important literary destinations in that part of the country. He visited Bath (for Jane Austen and Mary Shelley), Plymouth and Dartmoor (for Sir Conan Doyle), Stratford-Upon-Avon (for Shakespeare), Blenheim Palace (for Winston Churchill) and Oxford (for a whole host of authors and poets who have studied and published in the city).

Partnerships

We collaborated with Visit Devon, Destination Plymouth, Shakespeare’s England, Blenheim Palace, Oxford University Gardens, Libraries and Museums, Visit West and Great Western Railway. Together, we created an exciting itinerary which allowed Mr Huang to travel through the South West of England and enjoy the literary references alongside the superb tourism product of the country.

Results

The resulting travel feature in China National Travel Magazine extended to 36 full pages, with inspirational imagery inspiring the magazine’s off and online readership to consider a holiday in the UK. The magazine has a circulation figure of 500,000 copies, with a substantial online presence. More than 1,000,000 follow its Weibo account, and 100,000 follow its WeChat. The audience for the publication is perfect for this kind of holiday product. Readers are affluent Chinese, highly educated, with managerial and senior positions. Ages span 20-60 but the primary group is 30-50 years of age, living in Tier One cities in China and with a strong interest in travel.

Some of the hotels who hosted Mr Huang also benefited from the added value from an additional hotel feature written for CN Traveller.

You can see the full 36 page feature, published in July 2024, below.