Most Indian founders have never run a press trip. They’ve run a press release - drafted by an agency, blasted to a list of forty editors, opened by maybe six of them, and converted into coverage by one, if the quarter is kind. The economics are so poor that founders have quietly concluded PR doesn’t work. What they’ve actually concluded is that the cheapest version of PR doesn’t work, which is a different finding.
The press trip is the expensive version, and it still clears.
What a reporter does with two hours on-site
A press release gives a journalist facts they have to take on faith. A factory tour, a kitchen visit, an hour watching the actual production line - these give a journalist something they witnessed, which means something they can write with authority instead of attribution. That distinction matters more than founders think it does. “The company says its process is zero-waste” and “I watched the offcuts go straight into the next batch” are not the same sentence, and only one of them survives an editor’s cut.
The visit also solves the problem every press release creates: it answers questions the founder didn’t think to anticipate, in real time, in a way that builds trust instead of suspicion. A written statement can dodge a follow-up. A person standing on a factory floor cannot, and reporters know it - which is exactly why they trust what they see there more than what they’re told in an email.
Why founders stopped doing this
Partly cost, partly logistics, mostly discomfort. A press trip means opening the building to someone whose questions you don’t control, on a day you didn’t fully script. That’s uncomfortable in a way a press release never is. It’s also why it works - the thing a founder is afraid to show is usually the thing worth showing.
The version that scales down
This doesn’t require flying a Mumbai bureau chief to a plant in Coimbatore. The same logic works at a smaller radius - a local reporter spending an afternoon at the office, a city-beat journalist sitting in on an actual customer call, a regional outlet’s stringer watching a product ship. The unit economics of PR were never bad. Founders were just running the cheapest version of it and asking why it underperformed the expensive one.
Most founders will read this and still choose the press release next quarter, because it requires nothing of their calendar. That’s the real reason the press trip is underused - not cost, not risk, just the fact that it demands a founder’s time instead of an agency’s template.