There is a small problem at the center of luxury travel. A room can be immaculate, the pool can perform its blue miracle at sunset, and the spa can smell faintly of expensive trees. Then the hotel opens its mouth and sounds exactly like every other hotel. “Breathtaking.” “Unforgettable.” “Nestled.” The adjectives arrive like identical luggage on a carousel.
Diamond Public Relations has spent nearly two decades trying to rescue places from that carousel. The Miami-headquartered agency works only in travel and tourism: hotels, resorts, villas, islands and the organizations charged with persuading strangers to visit them. Its job is not simply to make a property look lovely. Travel is already drowning in lovely. The job is to discover the detail that makes a place discussable.
The publicist who learned to think like a hotelier
Jody Diamond began in Los Angeles as a celebrity publicist, then worked as a unit publicist on feature films. In 2000 she moved east and into tourism. The sequence matters. A film set teaches you that glamour is manufactured by logistics: timing, access, personalities, weather, a hundred invisible details. A resort works much the same way. The postcard is the finished product; behind it sits a machine of occupancy, seasonality, staffing and perishable inventory.
She moved from Hollywood publicity to tourism, then built an agency that can discuss a headline with an editor and revenue per available room with an owner.
Diamond PR opened in 2007, with Kara Rosner identified by the firm as a founding partner. The pair’s specialization became a kind of compound interest. Every hotel opening added operator fluency. Every destination brief deepened regional knowledge. Every press trip expanded a network of writers, broadcasters and creators. Today the public client roster runs from Hotel Rangá in Iceland and Ecoventura in the Galápagos to Jade Mountain in St. Lucia, W Punta de Mita in Mexico, resorts across the United States and several Caribbean destinations.
“We can talk the business of tourism, from load factors and seasonality, to ADR and RevPAR.”Diamond Public Relations
That line is the agency’s best advertisement. A generalist can pitch a rooftop bar. A tourism specialist should know why the bar matters in shoulder season, which feeder market can reach it, whether the story serves transient guests or groups, and what success looks like after the article lands. Diamond PR’s customers include general managers, sales and marketing directors, owners, management companies, asset managers, tourism boards and convention bureaus. Each cares about attention; none can live on attention alone.
The island hop that widened the audience
In 2023, Diamond PR organized an unusually large creator trip through Bonaire and Curaçao. Thirty TikTok creators arrived from the United States and Canada. Their combined following exceeded 40 million. The number is eye-catching, but the casting is more revealing: dancers, divers, food people, beauty creators, a family, three creators over 70, a mermaid and even Santa. Many were not travel specialists.
The expensive ingredient was not a slogan. It was choreography.
The old assumption discarded first was that a travel campaign needed only travel creators. Diamond PR designed for interests instead: food, dance, diving, age, family, fashion, LGBTQ audiences, sport and wellness. Curaçao supplied a mini carnival, scooters through Willemstad, murals, a local market, national parks, beaches, jet skis, cooking and tea-making. The place was not background. It became a stack of distinct narratives, each carried into a different community.
What did it cost? In the most instructive sense, six months of research, outreach and coordination, then the operational weight of moving 30 people through two islands and a packed program with tourism partners. That is the unglamorous side of earned attention. “Viral” often arrives wearing a spreadsheet and checking whether everyone made the ferry.
The choice of creators shows the change in thinking: category purity was less useful than audience variety. A destination is not consumed only by people who follow “travel.” It is consumed by people who eat, dance, age, raise children, dive and occasionally dress as Santa. The campaign made the audience definition look more like the destination itself.
More than the press release
The agency’s offer now spans three connected businesses. The first is classic public relations: story development, media outreach, press visits, broadcast placements, awards, crisis work and reputation management. The second is social and content: platform strategy, influencer collaborations, photography, aerial production, video, copy and paid or organic distribution. The third reaches into marketing and travel trade: email, familiarization trips, sales appointments, webinars, events, direct mail, trade shows and partnerships.
Clients buy customized agency engagements rather than a boxed product. The commercial logic is straightforward: retain people who already understand the strange vocabulary and tempo of hospitality, then use them as an extension of the property or destination team. That is why Diamond PR’s market position is narrow but not small. It competes with specialist firms such as J/PR, Quinn, LDPR and TURNER, not by offering every communications discipline to every industry, but by insisting that tourism knowledge changes the work itself.
Find the pressure
Start with the business problem: season, market, launch, recovery or reputation.
Find the odd detail
Look for the ritual, person, animal, flavor or access point no rival can copy.
Cast the audience
Choose media and creators for the people they reach, not their category label.
Close the loop
Connect coverage to useful signals: bookings, codes, inquiries, reach or reputation.
The work can be playful. An earlier campaign for a Cusco hotel used an alpaca named Panchita to deliver a FaceTime love gram and earned HSMAI Adrian recognition. A current client, Mountain View Grand in New Hampshire, offers a llama trek. These are funny details, but not frivolous ones. An editor can repeat them. A reader can picture them. A potential guest can tell a friend. “Luxury accommodations” cannot do any of those jobs.
Consistency beats the one-week splash
The island of Saba offers the quieter version of Diamond PR’s value. In 2022, its tourist bureau hired the agency for North American representation. Saba is small, and neighboring Caribbean destinations are loud. The stated need was consistency - a continuing presence in travel trade, consumer and lifestyle conversations, not a single burst followed by silence. Diamond already represented nearby destinations and understood the region, making coordination itself part of the advantage.
Bonaire offers a measurable glimpse of that long game. A 2021 progress report credited Diamond PR’s work with more than 126 media clips and reach above 102 million in North America. Reach is an imperfect number, as every honest publicist knows. But paired with stakeholder reviews, hosted media, trade work and repeated visibility, it shows how a specialist agency operates: campaigns become a program; the program becomes memory.
The copyable part - and its limits
- Copy the specificity. A local ritual beats a page of polished adjectives.
- Copy the audience design. Recruit around passions and communities, not one tidy influencer category.
- Copy the business fluency. Creative work improves when the agency understands inventory, seasonality and sales goals.
- Do not copy the spectacle without capacity. A thin itinerary, generic property or unprepared operation gives creators little worth sharing.
- Do not confuse reach with demand. The method weakens when there is no booking path, market priority or result the client can recognize.
Diamond PR’s most useful lesson is not “invite 30 TikTokers.” Most hotels should not. It is to treat a place as raw material instead of finished scenery. Begin with the commercial pressure. Find the detail that cannot be swapped with a rival’s. Put it in front of people whose audiences have a reason to care. Then build enough operational discipline around the idea that the story survives contact with reality.
The agency’s founder has argued that artificial intelligence cannot replace lived experience. In travel, that sounds less like a defense of publicists than a description of the product. A model can produce “breathtaking” before breakfast. It cannot ride the scooter through Willemstad, ask the tea maker an unexpected question, notice the 70-year-old creator dancing at carnival or understand why those moments might change someone’s idea of an island. Diamond PR’s business lives in that gap - between the adjective and the thing that actually happened.