Travel and tourism advertising in 2025 uses a range of formats and channels to engage and nurture prospective tourists. Destination marketing these days includes influencers, AR or VR technology, social media, user-generated content, and more. Many typical performance marketing tactics can be successful in travel and tourism advertising, but personalization, great quality creative, and storytelling are especially important.
When you’re working in destination marketing, consider ways to reach goals by using audience data wisely, understanding your target markets, telling great stories, building amazing visuals, and enticing your prospects with hidden deals, insider tips, and one-of-a-kind experiences. Plus, consider all the potential channels and formats to use to reach your desired targets.
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Which Tourism Ad Features Best Capture the Attention of Potential Customers?
Modern travel and tourism ads have gotten more creative and interesting in showcasing destinations — both well-known and off the beaten path. Consider the following features when you’re building these ad campaigns:
Use Amazing Visuals
You should always use the best possible visuals in creative ad campaigns. Nowhere will poor quality imagery stand out more than with travel and tourism audiences, so it’s worth putting your budget toward photography and videography of the destination you’re promoting. Recognizable landmarks or other sights can help anchor your campaign visually.
Tell a Story
Today’s travelers often have goals in their travel: Checking off a bucket-list item, volunteering locally, or exploring a particular food scene. When you’re marketing a destination, consider creating ads around various points of view or angles, and show real travelers to increase connection and relatability. This will also make personalization tactics easier.
Create or Highlight Experiences
Travelers today are interested in unique, less-well-known destinations or special experiences in popular locations. Make sure to match your audience segments with experiences, or create targeted copy or offers to show off experiences to prospects. These unique features might invoke emotion, spark daydreams, or align with values, such as sustainability.
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8 Best Travel Ads to Get Inspired in 2025 (and Why)
There are both classic and newer travel and tourism ads you can draw inspiration from. Take a look at a few below:
1. Stopover for Free With Icelandair
Icelandair’s “Stopover Buddy” ad campaign caught lots of travelers’ attention in 2016, when they made it easy for travelers to add a few days in Iceland to their trips with no added cost. The airline saw a 31% increase in stopover bookings, and the word of mouth and social buzz was significant. As Iceland’s national airline, Icelandair is marketing its services, but also marketing travel to the entire country.
Icelandair has continued its marketing strategy more recently with ads focused on authenticity and natural beauty. Its “Easy to Stop, Hard to Leave” video picked up the stopover story and showcases friendly Icelanders and an array of gorgeous scenery, too.
2. Live There With Airbnb
Airbnb, arguably the inventor of direct home and room rentals, grew organically and has created many memorable ad campaigns since its founding in 2007. Their “Live There” campaign brought a new angle to travel, showing users experiencing destinations immersively, rather than as tourists. With a rise in remote work, they targeted users who are able to extend visits to weeks, months, or more, living in an Airbnb like it’s home. They focused on authenticity, human connection, and showed off an interesting, diverse range of destinations.
3. Australia — Nothing Like It
Tourism Australia launched its “There’s Nothing Like Australia” advertising campaign in 2010 to show off stunning visuals of its country, home to landscapes and wildlife found nowhere else on earth. The campaign built an online platform for Australians to share travel stories and photos, then added TV spots and more.
After massive brushfires dominated global news about Australia 10 years later, the board revived the campaign. “There’s Still Nothing Like Australia” built on the branding of the first campaign and reminded visitors of rebuilding and the tourism opportunities that could help do good as part of that rebuilding effort.
4. What Happens in Vegas
When Las Vegas leaned into its “What Happens Here, Stays Here” marketing slogan, they coined a term for the city that’s used in casual conversation to this day. Previously, the city had been trying to rebrand itself as a family-friendly destination, but with this campaign, marketers leaned into Vegas’ reputation as a place for grown-up fun beyond simply gambling. They emphasized fun, freedom, and escape with the “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” phrase across multiple formats and channels. The city has continued to build on that initial campaign, billing itself as a destination for dining, sports, and more. Recent numbers show an 89% favorability rating of the city among Las Vegas ad viewers and increases in visitors to more than 42 million annually.
5. Emirates Offers Luxury
There’s a place for budget travel, but Emirates Airline launched its “Fly Better” ad campaign to show off luxury and comfort to prospects. Giving audience members permission to treat themselves can be a great piece of a personalization strategy, too — aspirational, “bucket-list” angles can spark daydreaming and long-term planning, as well as luxury add-ons to enjoy the travel itself. Emirates used TV ads to show off its in-flight services, beautiful details, and creative editing to spark imagination for prospective flyers. The campaign also served as a brand-builder for the airline.
6. New Angle for Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland, with its turbulent history, found a fresh angle for tourists with a Game of Thrones tie-in. After a 2016 storm destroyed many of the trees used in filming the HBO show, workers carved the fallen trees into doors to create a new “Journey of the Doors” experience across the country, enticing Game of Thrones fans to visit and creating a checklist-type event in the process. Like with Thomas Dambo’s Trollmap, this kind of public art can bring visitors to lesser-known or out-of-the-way destinations to boost local tourism. The photography also uses a lot of close-up imagery, which Taboola data found increases CVR by up to 74%.
7. Users Generate for GoPro
Along with destination-specific marketing, travel and tourism advertising also includes products and services closely tied to travel. That includes credit cards, airlines, accessories, and more, such as selfie sticks and action cameras like the GoPro. The GoPro is tailor-made for user-generated content advertising, since its audience is generally adventurous and looking for places to capture amazing photos and videos. Users were already posting heavily on social media, so GoPro tapped into that trend in various ways, encouraging users to post with their #GoPro hashtag, and offered other ways for them to submit content, including contests. They’ve created and maintained a strong brand identity along the way.
8. Inspiring Travelers With the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
Prospective travelers these days are often interested in sustainable travel, staying in lodging that’s carbon-neutral or offers other eco-friendly options. The World Wildlife Fund launched its recent “Adopt a Reef” campaign to educate visitors and offer a way for them to contribute to the places they’re visiting. Using high-quality imagery and gamified ways to get involved, like adopting a reef, the WWF also shows tourists the cost of tourism on coral reefs and the ways they can be involved in environmental protection. It’s a good lesson in brainstorming ways to take travel deeper for visitors and help align with values.
Advertising Strategies for Successful Travel Marketing
Target Intelligently
Travel and tourism advertising lends itself well to targeting and personalization. Use the data you have to segment your audience by demographics, spending ability, and interests, such as whether they’re looking for honeymoon trips, family vacations, or an adult getaway. Then, create top-notch imagery and copy to get your destination in front of them on the appropriate channels, and personalize messaging accordingly.
Use Channels Wisely
Travel and tourism marketing is a key channel for influencers. Travel bloggers covering niche areas have been around for many years, and social media influencers can play a major role in creating buzz around a destination. Targeting and audience segmentation is also essential when you’re using influencers: Depending on your goals, you could engage budget-conscious travelers, seniors, parents, wine-drinkers, or many other segments. This also lends authenticity and local flavor, both important to many travelers today.
Explore Personalization
Travel and tourism offer lots of ways to reach your prospects and then tailor to them. Depending on your industry, try engaging with micro-influencers in a particular segment for higher engagement rates, or focus on a particular experience at the destination you’re promoting, then use the resulting creative accordingly. Think about geo-targeting and retargeting your ads, and get the most out of local SEO and high-quality backlinks.
Key Takeaways
Travel and tourism marketing relies heavily on high-quality imagery and audience personalization. Use the best practices you already know, but put heavy emphasis on photography and video that tells a story, evokes emotions, aligns with values, or offers a must-see or bucket-list experience. Successful creative ad campaigns can draw travelers in to picture themselves in a destination, then book the trip to reach their goals and yours.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) you should track to measure the success of your tourism advertising campaigns?
You can generally use the same KPIs for tourism and travel advertising campaigns as other marketing campaigns. Track website traffic, online reviews, revenue generation, and whatever you’ve set for conversions, such as bookings. Use ROI, CPA, CTR, CAC, and other typical marketing metrics. In addition, track the success of influencer marketing campaigns to see if those are a good fit for your overall strategy.
What are the most effective digital marketing channels for reaching travelers?
The destination you’re promoting may have different effective digital marketing channels from another destination, depending on its benefits and particular audience. Disneyland and Las Vegas, for example, likely have different segments and thus different useful tactics. Understand your audience first, then build platform-specific strategies for each of them with the right tailored copy, creative, ads, and landing pages.
What types of visuals (photos, videos) are most engaging and inspiring for travel advertisements?
While photos and videos vary greatly across destinations, consider your audience when you’re building creative. Whatever the destination, use high-quality images with close-up details that show off what users want, whether it’s time at the beach or a great craft beer scene. Tailor copy to match, and see how you might use polls, quizzes, or interactive maps to connect with prospects. If possible, offer a live Q&A session or VR opportunities.
What are the current travel behaviors and preferences of different target audiences in 2025?
There’s more emphasis than ever on experience in travel these days, which varies greatly for target audiences — a 40th-birthday girls’ trip is quite different from a family reunion to introduce grandparents to grandkids! Whatever the case, use the data you’ve gathered up front to understand who you’re marketing to and what they want. Elicit excitement, joy, nostalgia, relaxation or whatever other emotion might be tied to the trip or destination. Measure your results to further refine messaging and target prospects.
