Historically, a wide range of businesses involved in the travel industry — such as hotels, airlines and cruise-liners — gladly pay the expenses of journalists to review their venue or service.

And although many recognise that a bad review is always possible, they negotiate these arrangements confident that if they are fastidious at their end, the journalist will report on them favourably.

Media familiarisation tours — famils in industry parlance — fund holidays for journalists with carefully crafted itineraries to generate positive publicity for the destinations and packages being sampled.

So whenever you see that line at the end of an article, “The journalist traveled courtesy of Queensland Tourism Commission”, that’s a dead giveaway that the writer was party to a targeted public relations campaign holiday.

Famils are usually co-ordinated by state and territory tourism bodies, often working in partnership with Tourism Australia.

Tourism Australia and the various state and territory commissions do not request to see copy before it goes to print. Rachel Crowley, corporate communications general manager for Tourism Australia, told the ACIJ that the tours rarely create negative press.

“It’s significantly less than paid advertising,” she said, indicating how important and cost effective famils have become as a PR strategy.

Tourism Australia tracks all media generated through these tours. In 2008-2009, Tourism Australia’s program was behind 1100 international feature stories. 531 journalists attended their famils and their coverage reached a cumulative audience of 5.3 billion people. Measured in financial terms, this was the equivalent of $92 million dollars worth of advertising.

Gold Coast Tourism communications director Ben Poll says that Gold Coast Tourism holds regular famils.

“We’ll do approximately 100 media famils a year. We will have over 100 journalists, whether they are television, online print journalists for our media program every year. We view media famils as one of the most important aspects about our media and PR strategy,” he said.

“A journalist really can’t understand or truthfully sell or talk about that destination or product unless they have tested the product. We believe that it is absolutely important that we have one of our staff members dedicated full-time to managing our media famils programs, that’s how important it is to us,” Poll said.

South Australia Tourism Commission’s Chris Booth says these inbound-tour programs helps “promote and give life to the qualities of these destinations that advertising and brochures can’t always achieve”.

In  2008-09, SATC’s famils generated national media coverage valued at $10.7 million.

A particularly major PR success was the 2009 Tour Down Under, a three-day event at Coober Pedy and William Creek, which gave media the chance to “experience first-hand” the cattle drive. The result was $266 million of editorial media coverage for the event. The 2010 event will be held in July, with six five-day/four-night tours planned for the media.

But Susan Kurosawa, travel editor at The Australian, told the ACIJ she believes that famils can strip journalists of independence.

“Personally, I prefer to travel independently and don’t like being led around ‘by the nose’ and pointed to stories the hosts want covered rather than those I wish to follow up,” she said. “We occasionally will send a journalist on an escorted familiarisation trip if there’s a really good theme or story angle but it’s not our preferred way of travel.”

Kurosawa said that though sponsored travel is a “necessary tool of trade”, The Australian also pays for travel, accommodation and ground arrangements, according to circumstance, and has a policy that requires full disclosure of travel sponsors in an article.

“We do not guarantee to a host that we will write a positive piece nor will we sign any agreements to that effect,” she said. “We report independently and fairly; the only responsibility we have is to the readers. Our pieces are frequently critical.”

Robert Upe, travel editor at The Age, expressed a similar opinion, explaining that Fairfax has a similar policy of disclosure and that any sponsored trips are only accepted on the paper’s terms.

“We reserve the right to report adversely or not report at all,” he said. “If there are stipulations such as ‘three stories must appear’ we decline the trips. Our preference is not to go on group famils, whether from a state tourist organisation or other sponsor, and to travel independently with plenty of time on itinerary for our travel writers to chase their own angles.”

Travel writer Erin O’Dwyer says one third of her articles are funded from her own travel and two thirds have evolved from trips paid for by tourist boards. The latter are “usually by a mix of tourist commission of the country plus the airline will kick in flights and hotels might kick in free accommodation. It’s normally put together by a tourist commission.”

Despite this, she is confident about her capacity to judge what the reader wants.

O’Dwyer writes for the Sydney Morning Herald, one of our surveyed publications, and said that its disclosure policy is very strict.

But she has noticed changes in travel journalism.

“There is less money available for places to sponsor trips. Likewise, in some cases there has been less advertising money, which means that newspaper sections are smaller. But I’ve also found that the complete opposite is true. There’s actually been quite a few trips organised. There is quite a lot of work around at the moment. Airlines and hotels and destinations are throwing a lot of money at advertising and specials to try and get people there,” she said.

This change is consistent with the opinion of David Dale, former editor of The Bulletin, and currently a Fairfax columnist. Having worked at Fairfax for several years, Dale says “there was a period of a couple of years where the Herald had a very strict code of ethics about travel journalism.” Dale should know, because he helped write the code.

“For a couple of years, the Herald was not accepting free trips or free hotels or anything like that — then they just found that it was too expensive for the paper to cover the cost of these things, so they went back to accepting some airfares and some accommodation — but they would then say at the end of a story: this was done as a result of a gift from Qantas or whatever,” Dale said.

Not all travel editors are concerned about sponsored travel. Travel editor of Adelaide’s Sunday Mail Brad Crouch believes the integrity of an article is not compromised when it is funded by a travel company.

“It doesn’t matter who pays for it. That’s the least of our worries. Our commitment is to our readers. We would get found out very quickly by our readers if we told them that a place was fantastic and it wasn’t. People spend their hard earned money based on what we tell them and they will let us know quick smart if we’ve done the wrong thing.”

But Crouch said that for an editor, choosing what stories to publish and satisfying the advertising requirements is a complex job.

Typical of all the publications surveyed, he said that occasionally the travel section will have a themed edition in order to help the advertising department pitch advertising space to certain clientele.

While these themed sections were less frequent before the newspaper crisis developed, there are more of them today.

He explained how his own publication worked.

“Every so often we will have a themed cruising edition and they can pitch adds to the cruising operators. We might have a European special when all the European early birds start to float around. So we will focus on Europe on an editorial side.”

This kind of advertorial can be located in the travel section of your favourite News or Fairfax publication. A recent themed example is found in the Sun-Herald’s travel special lift out, March 21. Just in time for the onset of the winter ski seasons in Australia and New Zealand, this seven-page special report [see our in-depth story on this ambiguous label here and here is obvious advertorial for Ski New Zealand, as confirmed by the Sun’s advertising department.

Written by two Sun-Herald journalists Craig Tansley and Rachael Oakes-Ash, the liftout has only one disclosure, to be found at the bottom of one (out of five) articles. It informs us that Tansley travelled courtesy of New Zealand Ski Tourism Marketing Network and Air New Zealand, but there is no indication at the end of Oake’s-Ash’s articles of who paid for what.

Reader’s may have noticed the back-to-back advertisements for Ski New Zealand and Air New Zealand as well as other similarly “themed” advertisers such as  Perisher, Air Canada and Burton Snowboards throughout the liftout. According to Tansley, a freelance writer, the stories were the product of a famil undertaken the previous season. Tansley also confirmed that Oakes-Ash operates the same way as he, and attended famils for this report, although they did not travel together.

Likewise, signed “Co-operative Partner Contributions” with media organisations amount to paid editorial, according to SATC spokesman Chris Booth. Booth said that the 2009-10 domestic marketing campaign represents a $7.8 million investment with trade and media partnerships, which grows to a total campaign value of $14.2 million.

According to the SATC’s annual report, the Fairfax partnership, which allowed “the delivery of unique, exclusive advertising and editorial content through custom publications — vital in building credible stories about the states’ key tourism experiences,” delivered double the value of the SATC’s advertising investment, or nearly $2.5 million. This would have included the significant editorial content in the SMH and The Age as part of the “Isn’t It About Time?” campaign.

And in turn, its corporate partnership with News Limited delivered a series of features in Adelaide Magazine and the travel sections of The Advertiser and Sunday Mail, which “combined editorial content with retail advertising”. In other words, advertorial.

Media famils are not the only strategy used by tourist commissions to promote a destination.

Tourism NT also has a partnership with National Geographic and the Discovery Channel, which target different consumer markets around the world. While Tourism NT has ads running on the channel, the channel also tailors its content so that documentaries it runs are about the Northern Territory.

Several of the state tourism bodies have “copy banks” available online — resources that provide complete editorial copy in PDF format for use at the media’s disposal. A communications manager for one of the state tourism commissions, who requested anonymity, said that she had often received correspondence from journalists interested in tailoring the ready-made copy for their specific publications.

According to the South Australia Tourism Commission, there were 4300 orders processed through the online Media Gallery in 2008-2009, resulting in more than 24,000 images distributed domestically and internationally.

It is clear that advertorial is big bucks to  newsprint advertising departments and the people who commission them. So the next time you open up the travel section to a rave review, don’t forget that service and value for money may not be the only forces at play.

Giselle Nguyen, Ajay Khandhar and Yasmin Geneva are Journalism students at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Additional research by Sasha Pavey, freelance journalist at the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism and Project Coordinator for Spinning the Media