PressStays.com launches with 50+ hotels and 500 media members

PressStays.com launched Thursday, Oct. 29 with more than 50 hotels signed up and 500 media members on board, giving hospitality properties direct access to a vetted pool of journalists and influencers for an introductory early-adopter rate of £299 plus VAT per property per month.

What does PressStays.com change for hotels?

The platform from creative PR agency Pic PR shifts media outreach from a bespoke agency retainer to a monthly membership. Pic PR says a full year on PressStays.com costs about as much as one month of agency support.

David Barrett, Pic PR’s founder and chief growth officer, said: “My role is about growth, and that doesn’t stop at the agency. It’s about helping the hotels we work with grow as well. PressStays.com goes even further, opening that support up to hotels far beyond our client list and helping the wider hospitality sector to grow, too.”

A two-sided workflow with hotel approval

Hotels create a profile and publish “Press Stay Opportunities” for approved media to browse and request. The workflow also runs in reverse: media members post briefs, and hotels can apply or invite specific people. Hotels decide which requests to accept, then manage messaging and follow-up inside the platform.

A “Performance & Impact” feature records the coverage and content produced by each stay. The tool gives hotels and media a shared record of results, but it does not make editorial coverage automatic.

Media membership is free. Journalists must provide proof of commissions or previous editorial work, while influencers undergo audience checks. The platform averaged five new applications a day during final testing.

The commercial exchange is the hosted stay: the media member receives it free, and the hotel pays no extra influencer fee. Both sides agree expectations before the visit. Pic PR keeps editorial coverage independent and never guarantees it. The hotel therefore still hosts the visitor and pays the membership without a contractual assurance of coverage.

Barrett framed the vetting system as a response to hotels’ difficulty judging creators: “The influencer world has exploded. Hotels are approached all the time, but how do you know who’s genuine and whether you should pay them on top of a free stay? For smaller hotels without a PR team it’s become a minefield. We wanted to take that uncertainty away.”

What the platform does not replace

Barrett said the idea had been developing for years because the agency knew how well the stays worked and how much time each required. PressStays.com does not replace a good PR agency, which still provides strategy, proactive work and creative storytelling.

The target is the independent hotel that cannot spend thousands a month on outside support. Barrett compared membership with roughly one night’s stay and said the service puts a property before a community seeking its next story.

Pic PR has arranged thousands of press stays through almost 15 years of hospitality PR work, and its long-standing media relationships underpin the platform. The agency, founded in April 2012, lists hospitality as a core specialism and has won or been shortlisted for more than 80 major PR and sector awards over the past five years.

At launch, the practical value proposition is straightforward: a hotel pays a set monthly price, controls which media requests it accepts and gains a record of resulting coverage. What that changes for smaller properties is access to a vetted media pipeline without a conventional retainer; what it cannot change is the independence of the coverage itself.

The platform’s next test is whether its 50-plus hotels and 500 media members generate completed stays and documented coverage, without guaranteed editorial outcomes.