Looking for PR advice for UK travel sites

[altyfc]

Hi all

First post so please go easy...

Looking for some PR advice. We have a new feature on a group of sites which we run which we're rather excited about. In short, you can pull up a Google map of a particular hotel in the UK, or a shop or tourist attraction or whatever, and see what other points of interest are nearby. This is combining data from the various sites we run that we have collated over many years.

So, for example, I can pull up a map of the Ritz Hotel in Mayfair and immediately get a visual that shows me that it's near Green Park Underground, there's a Planet Hollywood a few hundred metres down the road, and it's close to The Guards Museum on the edge of St. James Park. Each of these points of interest are clickable, with pages of further information. And across the UK, I would estimate that we probably have over 15,000 points of interest, each with their own clickable page (with description, picture, etc.)

I'm very pleased with the result and I think it's genuinely very useful to surfers. For instance, if you were travelling to Edinburgh on business late at night and wanted a hotel that's close to the station, you'd be able to find one relatively easily through the aid of these maps. I would therefore like to get the word out more and wondered whether a press release might be a good way to do this.

My questions are:

1) do you think a press release would be an effective way of raising awareness of what we've done?

2) if we did do a press release on this, what's the best approach to take? Something that doesn't scream 'advertisement'...? I don't have much experience of doing press releases so is it best to hire someone who has? Advice much appreciated...

3) how else would you suggest that I might raise awareness?

Thanks

Aaron