Meghan Patke and the art of making people care

Before the hotels, the airline accounts and the agency with her name on the founding story, Meghan Patke considered becoming an archaeologist. Egyptology appealed. So did law. The eventual profession would require a different kind of digging: finding something inside a business that another person might want to know. A room with a view is pleasant. A story needs somewhere to go.

Patke grew up in Singapore and made Los Angeles her home. Her work now moves among resorts, restaurants, aviation and the people whose livelihoods depend on persuading strangers to visit. She founded Modern Currency PR in 2017. The company’s name gives away its preoccupation: relevance, that slippery asset which cannot be deposited in a bank and has a habit of expiring.

Her career offers an unusually appetizing inventory of assignments. Hello Kitty’s 35th birthday sits beside work involving sustainable seafood. Luxury hotels share space with culinary personalities. The variety is amusing; the underlying problem is consistent. Someone has made something, opened somewhere or changed something. Patke’s job is to work out why the rest of us should care.

A childhood with departures built in

Travel was part of family life before it became part of the job. Patke was raised among academics, with books and trips supplying different routes into other people’s worlds. At 17, she left for college in the United States. She attended the University of Southern California from 2002 to 2006; her student activities included The Daily Trojan and the Public Relations Student Society of America.

There is a pleasing continuity between the campus newspaper and a career spent talking to journalists. Both require an idea to survive contact with somebody who has other things to do. Enthusiasm helps, but it cannot substitute for a reason to read. The publicist has to understand the appeal from the other side of the conversation.

A travel photograph she shared shows her in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, in 2018. It gives a less corporate view of a profession often illustrated with immaculate rooms and impeccably arranged tables. Here the destination has people in it. For a person whose business is describing experiences, that seems a useful place to begin.

Her early interests included tennis, rugby, volleyball and football. She has described herself as curious, loyal and sometimes impatient, a combination that makes the eventual professional advice about taking one’s time rather more human. Patience can be a working discipline even when it is hardly a person’s default setting. There are books to read, places to go and, apparently, several sports to fit in before departure.

An agency with room for her own perspective

Before becoming an owner, Patke learned the business inside an agency. At Wagstaff, she progressed from account coordinator to vice president. By the time she set up Modern Currency with longtime friend Lisa Strangis, she had spent nearly 11 years at a national hospitality PR firm. The move into ownership came with substantial experience of the work she intended to sell.

Her explanation for starting the company also reaches beyond a business opportunity. She wanted an agency and community closer to the inclusive environment in which she had grown up. Representation mattered to her. So did the character of the workplace she could create.

“I was not seeing representation and diversity around me”

Meghan Patke, reflecting on founding her agency

There is an organizational decision inside that personal explanation. Starting a firm allows a founder to choose who helps shape the conversation, which experiences count and how people are expected to work together. Those choices eventually have to show up in hiring, assignments and ordinary working relationships. An intention becomes consequential when somebody puts it on the calendar.

Modern Currency describes itself as woman-led and minority-owned. Patke’s role includes overarching campaign strategy. Ownership, in this case, has kept her close to the question that interested her as a practitioner: which detail will make the story travel?

The patient business of getting noticed

Patke’s published advice to other publicists has a quiet streak. She encourages her team to consider the journalist’s position, to listen and read, and to take time developing an idea. She values the months that can go into a single long-form story. Her compact instruction is to “keep the long game in mind.”

That is an interesting position for someone selling attention. A publicity calendar encourages speed. A hotel opening has a date. A restaurant needs people through the door. Yet the piece that explains a place properly may require a writer’s interest to develop, questions to be answered and an experience to be understood. The patience has a purpose.

A client can be deeply attached to information that has little meaning outside the business. An editor has to think about the person reading. Between those positions sits the publicist, translating importance into interest. A useful pitch supplies enough detail for someone else to recognize the possibility. Adjectives are poor substitutes. They also tend to arrive overdressed.

Who gets to tell the food story

The agency’s launch work for Netflix’s High on the Hog brings Patke’s interest in representation into a particular assignment. The campaign helped amplify Black culinary and travel writers. Food publicity, in that setting, carries questions about whose knowledge is sought and whose perspective reaches an audience.

The PR Net’s 2023 Next Gen recognition included that work in its account of the agency. It also named a client roster spanning Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea, JSX, Fairmont Miramar, Castle Hot Springs, Hotel Figueroa and Providence. Together, the names trace a journey: the flight, the stay, the meal. They also suggest how many different kinds of expertise hospitality communications must accommodate.

Providence supplies a concrete example. The Los Angeles restaurant’s cooking is built around Michael Cimarusti’s commitment to sustainable seafood. Patke is its public media contact. Explaining that work means engaging with ingredients, sourcing and the decisions behind a menu. There is more available to a curious writer than a photograph of a plate, however beautifully it has been lit.

The publicist’s opportunity is to make such decisions legible. A diner can enjoy dinner without knowing its background. A reader may be drawn in precisely by that background. Communications connects those two kinds of interest, giving the experience a context beyond the reservation.

The brief gets bigger

Recognition has followed both the founder and the agency. Patke was an Industry Innovator honoree in the 2022 PRNEWS Top Women Awards. In October 2025, Modern Currency received a PRSA-LA PRism Award for its Providence media-relations campaign and an Award of Excellence for the launch of Few & Far Luvhondo.

The two 2025 campaigns were recognized in different categories: culinary earned media and a launch on a budget below $10,000. That distinction puts some useful texture around the word luxury. The setting may be expensive; the communications assignment still has a budget, constraints and a particular result to pursue. A beautiful location does not remove the need to make choices.

Geography was changing too. In August 2025, the agency announced offices in San Diego and Denver, with New York planned for early 2026. Its Digital Studio was also expanding, covering social strategy, content, influencer partnerships, paid campaigns and short video. The current agency website lists strategists across Los Angeles, New York, San Diego, Orange County and Arizona.

Those additions widen the founder’s brief. A media story, a social post and a brand partnership ask different things of an audience. They also compete for the same finite attention. Keeping the underlying description clear becomes more demanding as the number of places it appears grows.

A new question at the hotel door

On August 20, 2026, Modern Currency announced an AI Visibility and Generative Engine Optimization practice. The service includes examining how brands appear in AI answers, monitoring reputation and improving website content. Samantha Dominguez leads GEO strategy and implementation within the agency’s Digital Studio.

Patke’s question in the announcement was direct: “What does AI know about our brand”. It is a practical extension of her earlier work. A recommendation can begin before a traveler reaches a publication, a booking page or a hotel’s own website. The description encountered there becomes part of the business’s introduction.

For hospitality, the stakes are concrete. A guest arrives with expectations. Clear information helps establish them; vague information leaves more room for disappointment. The new service gives Patke’s agency another place to examine how an experience is represented. The quality of the eventual stay still has to be delivered by the people on the property.

There is always another departure

Patke’s life outside the brief remains visible in small preferences. Her Los Angeles recommendations have included The Magic Castle and Musso & Frank, along with the circuit around the Lake Hollywood reservoir. Her current travel wish list includes Antarctica, Mongolia and Bhutan. Even a professional itinerary has unfinished business.

She has also credited a plate of Hainanese chicken rice with the power to turn a difficult day around. It is a wonderfully specific recommendation from someone whose professional world includes elaborate dining experiences. A familiar meal can carry an entire geography of associations. For Patke, the connection between food and place has a personal address as well as a client brief.

Those details give the founder room to exist beyond the account list. She can recommend an evening, remember a journey and plan another one. The person asking what makes a place worth talking about has places she still wants to see. Somewhere between the next departure and the next deadline, there will be another detail to notice.