12.06.2026 |

Media relations is not dead. It has become more selective.

In today’s world, range can always be bought. It gives companies high visibility in a flash. Building trust takes much longer, and that’s where media relations work begins. This was our experience when establishing our hotel brand REVIER. 

As a young Swiss hotel group, we faced the tough question of how to quickly gain visibility. The simplest solution: buying reach. Through ads, influencers and campaigns. Yet visibility isn’t the same thing as trust, which is why we focused on media relations right from the start. We soon realised that not all media relations work is equal. After all, traditional media releases alone aren’t enough anymore in today’s world. Anyone who believes that mailing lists are a good way of creating visibility are doomed to be ignored. In a shrinking media landscape with fewer resources, relevance and relationships matter more than ever. Anybody without access to newsrooms simply does not exist. 

Today, successful media relations means: Identify topics at an early stage, position them strategically and build on them through personal interaction. Fewer outbound messages, more dialogue. Especially in the hotel industry – where expectations and experiences are closely intertwined – who talks about you makes a difference. An editorial article carries a different weight than any campaign of your own making. That type of credibility cannot be bought, only earned. 

Access is key 

However, for a company like us – based in Lenzerheide, far removed from the national media – the reality of media relations quickly became apparent: Nothing happens if you don’t have access. We therefore made a conscious decision to work with a PR agency. And with open up, we’ve found a partner who ‘opens up’ precisely this access and has a direct line to the right journalists. A partner who also tells us whether a piece of information is even relevant. That’s actually another thing we’ve had to learn: Not everything that’s of interest to us is also of interest to the media. 

Media outlets want topics that are relevant to their readers. We’ve seen for ourselves what this means in concrete terms with our hotel flat rate: it’s a model that deliberately breaks with traditional booking approaches. For us, it was more than just a product launch. It was a conversation starter. And the response was enormous. Not because we were particularly noisy, but because the idea struck a chord and was immediately picked up as a story by many newsrooms. 

Trust beats reach 

Media relations is not dead. It has become more selective. Anyone who delivers relevance and cultivates relationships will be heard. Anyone who merely hits ‘Send’ is ignored. Reach can be bought. Not trust. That’s why media relations are essential.