Why I Started Aim & Grace

One of the proudest moments of my early career involved a very early morning, a radio station and a lot of cured fish. After a dawn drop-off at BBC Radio 2, Terry Wogan read out my press release about Craster Kippers to promote Visit Northumberland and the rather obscure St Cuthbert’s Day on air. It was a long shot and it had to be someone eager (or daft) enough to get up at silly o'clock to tell it. To me, that's still what travel PR is about, because without a bit of hustle, it is hard to get cut through.

That was about twenty years ago. Back then I was faxing press releases to journalists, franking the mail and stuffing ferry passes into envelopes in the days before anyone in the UK even had an iPhone let alone a social presence. It seems positively archaic and when I tell stories of having to persuade tourism boards that Facebook was ‘the future’ I feel like I should be in a rocking chair and knitting a blanket. Since then I've watched our industry reinvent itself more than once. There were bloggers, then social media before anyone had a name for it, then creators, and now AI. Every few years the tools change completely. What hasn't changed is the problem I kept running into, and in the end it's why Grace and I started Aim & Grace.

‍The gap we kept seeing
‍Too many brilliant travel brands can't get senior counsel. Some are priced out of it. Others get it at the pitch and then, once the contract is signed, quietly find their account run by a junior team.

Over the last decade, a lot of the established mid-sized travel agencies have been bought by international networks. That usually brings higher fees and bigger account portfolios, and more of the day-to-day work lands on less experienced people because those higher up simply don’t have the bandwidth. And don’t get me wrong, I LOVE mentoring and training junior members of a team, but some aspects of comms need experience and agility, not teachable moments and layers of sign off. Network agencies often can't take on competing destinations or several brands in the same specialism, so are either turning things down or creating conflict shops under the same roof to keep it all in the family. At the other end, many smaller independents are still relying on traditional press office tactics, or they're too small for the integrated briefs clients now ask for.

Meanwhile, budgets are shrinking and in-house teams are leaner than ever. The brands I talk to don't need more headcount on their account. They need experienced people who will roll their sleeves up. I know I'm not imagining it, because so many of my senior freelance friends are already at capacity. When the most experienced people in the industry are turning work away, it tells you exactly what clients are looking for, and how hard it is to find.

‍Why Grace?
‍I love working with Grace Parker, and that was as big a part of this decision as any market analysis. We led the UK travel team at FINN Partners together. That team won PR Agency of the Year at both the TravMedia Awards and The Travel Marketing Awards. I'm very grateful for everything I learned there and for the people I worked alongside.

Grace spent 14 years at TUI. She led the UK launch of the Dreamliner and the rebrand from Thomson to TUI, and once talked Sorrento's port authorities into letting two jet skis into the harbour for a photo. She's just as good at steering a business through a crisis at 3am or finding the perfect speaking opportunity with absolutely on point messaging briefing. Our strengths are different but they fit and at some point the question stopped being "should we?" and became "why haven't we?"

‍What we're building
‍Aim & Grace brings the quality and strategic thinking of a big agency and the understanding of in-house requirements together with the flexibility, personal service and affordability of a boutique consultancy. It's built on three principles.
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▪ Personal service.
The people you meet are the people who do the work. Every client gets the two of us, whatever the size of their budget.
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▪ Honest advice.
We'll always give you the honest answer rather than the easy one. Two decades of doing this means I'd rather have an awkward conversation early than a disappointing one later.
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▪ Strategy first.
Great ideas only work when they're based on insight and a clear purpose.

We also plan PR, social media and GEO together rather than splitting them across separate teams. More and more travellers now ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot where to go and where to stay. Being recommended by those platforms comes down to what good PR has always been built on: credible coverage, a consistent story and the right people talking about you. We use AI every day where it makes the work better, but we'd never let it do our thinking for us. Knowing when the tools have got it wrong is where experience counts. Just ask my Claude account, we had to go on a two day break a couple of weeks ago because frankly Claude, who I like to think of as my sassy little French robot, was being obstinate.

Where a brief needs more than the two of us, we bring in a network of specialists we know and trust. This network has been built over years of knowing who does things to a standard we would be delighted with, all are people we have hired, collaborated with or long admired. We'll always be upfront about which is which.

‍Doing good, not just good work
‍I’m an Elder Millennial, so this part matters to me a lot. We'll only partner with organisations that make a positive contribution through tourism, whether that's supporting local communities or championing responsible travel. It builds on my time co-chairing the AITO Sustainability Committee and as an active member of the Sustainable Travel Agora. I was a proud recipient of the TTG Diversity Champion 2023 and being part of the founding partnership for the Step Up Internship to drive diversity in travel media and communications is something I am extremely proud of. There’s so much we can do and I am currently studying for the ICRT Professional Certificate in Responsible Tourism as I am hungry to learn ways to do better and be better. Tourism can do a great deal of good when it's done well, and I want our work to add to that.

‍So, here we are
‍Starting from scratch after an entire career having a stable paycheck is equal parts thrilling and terrifying. Luckily we haven't had to do it alone. A huge thank you to my incredibly talented brother John Duff, who created our branding and built our website, and patiently put up with more "can we just tweak one more thing?" messages than any sibling should have to. Thank you as well to the brilliant Beth Crockatt of Distracted Media for making us look far more polished than we felt on shoot day, and to the long list of industry pals and competitors who have gone out of their way to offer us words of wisdom, take us for a coffee, given us opportunities or simply cheered us on this far. It has been so overwhelming and will not be forgotten.If you're a tourism board, airline, hotel group, tour operator or travel brand with a story worth telling, we'd love to hear it.

Drop us a line at hello@aimandgrace.com and let's put the kettle on.
Amy