This week I was lucky enough to head to the Cotswolds for a one-night stay at The Lygon Arms, where celeb chef James Martin has just launched his new restaurant. It all went swimmingly, if you ignore the brief drama where my friend and I drove to the wrong Lygon Arms and were confronted with bolted doors and a small building which, as we kept saying, “really does not look like the pictures”. Once we did arrive in the right place, there was everything you’d want from a Cotswolds stay: characterful bedroom complete with beams and moody paintings, posh toiletries, hearty food, a jaunt to an overpriced deli the next morning. Fabulous.
Going on press trips is one of the biggest perks of the being a journalist. I couldn’t believe it 12 years ago when I was first invited on one. At the time I was reporter at a hair and beauty business magazine, and the gig in question was a trip to Amsterdam for the launch of a new hairdressing training course. I’m not going to lie, it was not glamorous - it consisted almost entirely of sitting in a hall watching student hairdressers learn how to cut hair - but I couldn’t believe that I actually got to go and stay in a swanky hotel and meet new people for work. When you consider that the starting salaries in journalism are often below £20k, even flying to Amsterdam to watch people cut fringes feels luxurious beyond belief.
Since then I’ve had some truly mind-blowing trips, from a magical safari in Botswana to a five-star stay in Abu Dhabi. But you probably don’t want to hear about that, because it’s just annoying. You want to know about the mad things that have happened. My wildest trip ever was (perhaps predictably) to Ibiza. Going to the party island with a bunch of people you’ve never met before is a strange experience, but we all got on well and behaved ourselves, until the last night where everybody went insane. I got so drunk that I have no idea how I got back to the villa, and the next morning woke up for our 10am flight with a creeping sense of dread that I’d seriously embarrassed myself (and a hangover so bad that I couldn’t speak or eat for about 8 hours). Luckily, it turned out I had been surpassed by a) the owner of the travel company we visited with, who had managed to lose the key to the safe that had all our passports in and b) a male journalist from a daily newspaper, who had gone off home with a girl the night before and not turned up again.
Thanks to the truly heroic efforts of the PR in charge of the trip, we got our passports back via an emergency locksmith (not easy to find with 15 minutes notice on a Sunday morning in Ibiza). We did, however, fly home minus one journalist, who sheepishly called the PR after we landed at Stansted and was told he’d have to cover his own flight home. The relief of knowing you weren’t the worst behaved drunk of the night is so sweet.
Going on ‘holiday’ with complete strangers is eye-opening. On the whole, I’ve got on well with everyone; in my experience journalists tend to be interesting and interested people, so the conversation flows. However, you do get the occasional odd ball: I recall a middle-aged woman who seemed very much out for a fight and kept spouting her controversial opinions at breakfast, and the reporter who insisted they were teetotal at mealtimes but who, it was revealed on checkout, had drunk the very expensive mini-bar dry. During these trips, you’ll compare horror stories - I’ve heard about journalists locking themselves in rooms, refusing to take part in any of the planned activities, getting hideously drunk on the first night and then trying to feel up the waiting staff. There’s the famous story of a journalist bringing her curtains to be dry-cleaned on a press trip, and while I’ve never seen behaviour on that scale, there is something about these trips that can bring out the diva in people.
It’s not always the journalists behaving badly though. One friend went on a trip where the PR swept off to first class on the flight, leaving her guests to scrabble around in economy. Another tells of a PR who spent the *entire* trip bitching about how crap the hotel was. I’ve been lucky and always been on trips with really brilliant PRs. If anything, I spend the whole time in awe of how they stay serene while taking a mad gaggle of hacks on holiday and dealing with all our endless questions.
Only once have I been the diva-ish journalist on a press trip, and it was when I went to Florida. The itinerary included a trip to SeaWorld and, having just watched Blackfish, I really didn’t want to go. What’s more, the publication I was writing for said they wouldn’t cover it. So I refused to visit, much to the annoyance of the Orlando Tourist Board. Instead, I was to be punished with ‘an activity on my own’.
Guys - they sent me to a water park by myself. Can you understand how much fun it is riding rubber ring slides and bounding into the wave machine all day on your own? I was the only adult there not looking after a child! God, I love press trips.
Haha love this! What a fun perk of the job!