BP Dollars Fund Travel Writer Junket to Gulf Coast*

Tourism boards often invite travel writers to visit places, all expenses paid, hoping for positive coverage.

The practice has always raised ethical concerns, but a recent junket to the Gulf Coast is drawing more critical attention than usual because the funding originated with BP. The oil company gave $551,000 to the Santa Rosa County Tourist Development Council, and the council used a small portion of it to bring six travel writers to Florida’s Navarre Beach region. According to an article in the Pensacola News Journal (a Los Angeles Times blog has also picked up the story), they were “chauffeured around in a limo” and put up in condominiums “to get the word out that this summer’s BP oil spill is over, and the beach, along with the rest of Santa Rosa County, is open for tourism.”

According to the same article, the writers worked for publications such as Baton Rouge Parents, the Houston Tribune, Southern Hospitality Magazine, PlanetEyeTraveler.com, UPTake.com and JustSayGo.com.

Among the writers on the trip was Ron Stern, who wrote an article for JustSayGo.com raving about his visit.

After checking in, I wasted no time and headed out to check the beach and water conditions. As I suspected, what I found was a beautiful white sand beach (actually comprised of quartz) with no visible tar. I waded out into the emerald-green water and looked for any signs of smelly, slimy oil. Nope, nothing except for some swimmers, seagulls and families enjoying the sunshine, gorgeous water and clean shores. So much for everything I had been hearing and seeing, at least in Navarre.

Kate Wilkes, the executive director of the Santa Rosa County Tourist Development Council, told me she was happy to be able to bring writers to the area. Not every place in the Gulf suffered the same kind of damage from the oil spill, she said. Little oil is to be found on Navarre Beach, yet visits have plummeted and the area has seen bed tax dollars drop 40 percent in the last year. Local businesses are hurting.

“The national news made it sound like we were all covered with oil and dead pelicans,” she said. “My job is to make sure that as long as it’s safe and a good place to take a vacation, that people know about it.”

Was she troubled by the fact that coverage of the trip could also play into BP’s public relations campaign?

“They created this mess and it ruined peoples’ lives,” she said. “Our summer season was crippled. We know from the hurricanes that it can take two or three years to come back from these things. They need to help make people whole.”

She added, “If it helps BP, there won’t be a moment that I’ll say BP has done their job and we’re all square. It could be three years before we can say that.”

She didn’t know whether the writers were aware their trips were funded by BP. Had they asked, she said, they would have been told, adding, “There are certainly no secrets about it.”

Update: 4:12 p.m. ET: I just spoke with Ron Stern, who wrote the JustSayGo.com story.

He said he didn’t know at the time he was on the trip that funding for it had come from BP. Had he known, he would have stayed home: “For perception purposes, I wouldn’t have taken the trip.”

Nevertheless, he’s not sure this trip raises any new questions about junkets and ethics just because it was funded by BP.

“The reality is you could make the same argument about any press trip,” he said. “Do press trips compromise objectivity? Nobody tells me what to think or write and I wrote it as I saw it.”

He said he finds some of the coverage about the trip “extremely offensive” because it suggests the writers were beholden to BP and “in their pocket.” That, he said, wasn’t the case.

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