Destination marketing organisations are shifting from rigid, large-scale periodic campaigns towards agile, "always-on" strategies that balance campaign intensity with sustained engagement, driven by declining brand loyalty particularly amongst younger and older travellers. This hybrid approach emphasises authentic partnerships, performance-driven optimisation and integrated brand orchestration to maintain relevance across fragmented digital ecosystems and evolving visitor expectations.
As brand loyalty erodes, especially among younger travellers (18-24) and those over 65, destinations are moving beyond rigid, large-scale periodic campaigns and increasingly recognising that the balance must shift towards nimble marketing strategies that prioritise "always-on" activations. By reacting to rapidly changing visitor expectations and engagement patterns, destinations can deliver genuinely authentic and resonant content, optimising every touchpoint for maximum impact throughout the entire year, rather than concentrated campaign bursts. Ensuring marketers can respond to these more fluid engagement patterns will bring competitive advantages in brand recognition and gather valuable multi-dimensional insights that single-campaign approaches could never provide. Our panel of destination experts were evenly split on whether agile marketing strategies will replace traditional campaign models, with the predicted level of convergence showing fairly even distribution between traditional campaign-focused strategies and a more integrated approach.
Rethinking Loyalty
The evolution of brand loyalty in tourism reflects broader shifts in visitor behaviour and relationship formation with destinations. In an era of brand doubt, traditional loyalty mechanisms based on transactional rewards are giving way to more refined emotional and experiential connections that transcend single-visit interactions. Rather than purely promotional messaging, destination loyalty increasingly depends on values alignment and authentic experiences. This involves destination marketers developing brand ecosystems that can sustain long-term emotional connections and a sophisticated understanding of how brand loyalty forms among different generations and how to tailor communication to reach them.
With experiences often highly memorable, word-of-mouth and social proof play disproportionately important roles in driving future engagement and recommendation behaviour. At the same time, destination taglines have evolved from simple, memorable phrases to complex identity systems that must function across multiple touchpoints and cultural contexts. The contemporary challenge lies in creating brand identities that remain recognisable across diverse engagement contexts while maintaining relevance and inspiration for increasingly discerning travellers.
Integrated Brand Orchestration
The convergence of campaign intensity and always-on engagement presents compelling opportunities for destination brands to create more cohesive visitor experiences. Finding the equilibrium between both approaches will be key to long-term marketing success through a combined approach to full funnel marketing. With agile always-on content, DMOs are able to tap into trending news and opportunities to boost engagement, such as Visit Benidorm's foray into the AI dolls trend. Integrated approaches enable brands to represent themselves consistently across multiple touchpoints while maintaining the flexibility to intensify engagement during critical moments. This capability can significantly enhance the quality of visitor interactions and make marketing communications more relevant and timely.
While always-on activations result in a short-term uplift in searches and conversion, they risk being a short-sighted strategy that results in declining brand equity. However, sometimes it takes a concentrated impact to penetrate the attention barrier, with paid campaigns focusing on maximising reach and high-quality brand-building that shapes lasting perceptions. Beyond pure promotional messaging, traditional campaign approaches can evolve into comprehensive engagement systems that better support visitor journey complexity and decision-making processes. The ability to orchestrate both campaign intensity and sustained engagement could become a key differentiator in building lasting visitor relationships. On the other hand, by the end of 2024, marketers targeting Gen X (45-60) dropped from 67% to 41%, while those targeting Boomers (61-79) decreased from 27% to 19% in the space of a year, highlighting the importance of adaptive targeting strategies that respond to changing demographic priorities to focus on long-term brand awareness and relevancy.
Strategic Partnership Ecosystems
Taking into account rapid changes in visitor attention spans, especially among the Gen Z (13-28) audience DMOs are increasingly prioritising, the marketing landscape has witnessed a fundamental shift toward collaborative brand ecosystems, where strategic partnerships serve as multipliers for reach and engagement depth. Brand partnerships represent mechanisms for creating authentic touchpoints that transcend traditional advertising boundaries. These collaborative frameworks enable destinations to leverage established brand equity while simultaneously expanding their narrative through carefully designed micro-campaigns that maintain strategic coherence across multiple brand identities.
In 2024, 89% of travellers turned to social media for travel inspiration, highlighting the critical importance of authentic brand collaborations that can penetrate saturated digital environments. The strategic deployment of micro-campaigns through partnership channels allows destinations to simultaneously create multiple engagement vectors, maximising exposure efficiency while maintaining message integrity. Tourism Tasmania's partnership with Jeep and Adventure.com for a week-long EV road trip exploring the state's gastronomic offer is a notable example of where DMOs see opportunities in collaborating with brands outside the tourism sector. By clearly focusing on a specific segment, such a targeted micro-campaign ensures messages are relevant and fine-tuned for the target audience rather than attempting to be a catch-all advertisement that might struggle to convey the same impact due to dilution of the story into a broader narrative.
The collaboration between established lifestyle brands and DMOs exemplifies this strategic pattern, where cultural alignment creates authentic engagement opportunities that feel organic. These partnerships enable destinations to access established audience bases while providing partners with compelling content that enhances their own brand narrative. The key strategic advantage lies in the ability to create multiple touchpoints across different brand ecosystems, amplifying reach while maintaining authentic engagement that resonates with diverse audience segments. The collaboration between Monocle and Visit Portugal for a spring market in London is an example of this, with the pop-up event portraying Portuguese design, gastronomy and culture and supported by broader content activation about the reasons to visit the country. Such small-scale pop-ups are becoming a trendy approach for DMOs to build personal connections with prospective travellers, enabling space for more in-depth conversations with visitors.
Extending beyond traditional media buying strategies for campaign launches, visitor behaviour patterns are simultaneously gravitating toward multi-channel engagement, leading to growing complexity in attribution modelling across these touchpoints. The natural evolution of this trend is the combination of campaign intensity with sustained brand presence. This fusion offers a more comprehensive approach for brands to maintain visibility while maximising impact during critical moments. For marketing teams and strategists, the key challenge lies in ensuring that campaign messaging and always-on content are appropriately coordinated to surface effectively in response to diverse customer intent signals.
With marketing technology platforms now integrating advanced attribution modelling, destination marketers must focus on understanding how to adapt to shifting engagement patterns across different visitor segments. While impressions from social content yield astonishing figures, 85% of views last less than 2.5 seconds and fail to reach the attention-memory threshold required to drive visitors to take an action. Surprisingly, for delivering mass audience attention, TV remains a critical platform, with attention-adjusted Cost Per Mille (CPM) showing that while social content is much cheaper to produce than a full-blown TV advert, the return on investment is much lower, with a CPM of £3.25 compared to £1.19. The rise of streaming platforms, however, illustrates how viewing behaviour has shifted towards on-demand consumption, necessitating a raft of new tools for destinations to establish a much more targeted and data-driven strategy for reaching travellers.
While TV remains an influential channel, content must be emotive and use compelling storytelling that doesn't feel overtly promotional. In sharing messages that visitors are actually searching for, such as the Bermuda Tourism Authority's "Where is Bermuda" video, authenticity shines through and builds a strong connection to drive curiosity to visit among potential visitors. Dynamic campaign optimisation now enables brands to pivot between awareness-building campaigns and conversion-focused activations based on real-time performance data. With budget flexibility as the foundation of understanding marketing effectiveness, this enables DMOs to optimise resource allocation across the entire visitor journey, supported by detailed performance analytics and audience segmentation capabilities. 84% of brands and marketers said they see good results with their Pay Per Click advertising campaigns in 2024, demonstrating the effectiveness of targeted campaign approaches. This further strengthens the connection between strategic planning and tactical execution. Nevertheless, while the method of budget deployment is evolving, the core importance of strategic messaging and brand consistency remains paramount.
Hybrid Campaign Approaches
Despite the enhanced ability for dynamic campaign optimisation, some DMOs have moved away from traditional, one-off campaigns towards a more agile and responsive digital strategy. By the end of 2024, 60% of marketing was digital, signalling a broad shift toward more substantial digital investments as destinations increasingly expect strategic frameworks to act as intelligent systems that understand intent and support both awareness-building and conversion. With this in mind, 99% of marketing teams using an always-on approach rate their programmes as effective, demonstrating that the global marketing ecosystem is moving toward a focus on dynamic and responsive marketing to deliver more contextually relevant results, which will be key to the continued improvement of engagement across diverse customer touchpoints.
Cape Town Tourism's approach exemplifies how dynamic resource allocation can balance content continuity against campaign intensity, helping the city to maintain visibility while maximising impact during peak engagement periods. Instead of waiting to launch a major campaign to drive engagement, embracing an always-on approach through various content formats, including quick-turnaround reels, seasonal guides, neighbourhood spotlights and leveraging real-time insights and user-generated content, the DMO’s dynamic mix of inspiration, utility and authenticity aims to meet the audience in the moment and keep the destination top of mind regardless of whether someone is planning, visiting or dreaming of a trip. In doing so, content is continuously relevant, reactive and meaningful across platforms, adapting alongside the changes in how visitors discover and share travel inspiration.
At the same time, interest in integrated marketing approaches that combine traditional campaign mechanics with persistent engagement methodologies has increased, with marketing orchestration now involving a far more complex budgetary framework. Strategically combining campaign intensity with always-on engagement is expected to lead the way in effective brand building and visitor relationship management across increasingly fragmented digital ecosystems. Good content and always-on activation work in unity to tell quality stories and signal clarity, with this cohesive balance central to shaping long-term marketing strategies. These constant reminders will be vital for providing depth in communication and go beyond the stereotypical visuals portrayed in large-scale campaigns to meaningfully communicate the vibrancy of a destination throughout the year and giving space for the often hidden stories to be shared as a true differentiator of destination selection and cultural immersion.
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As brand loyalty erodes, especially among younger travellers (18-24) and those over 65, destinations are moving beyond rigid, large-scale periodic campaigns and increasingly recognising that the balance must shift towards nimble marketing strategies that prioritise "always-on" activations. By reacting to rapidly changing visitor expectations and engagement patterns, destinations can deliver genuinely authentic and resonant content, optimising every touchpoint for maximum impact throughout the entire year, rather than concentrated campaign bursts. Ensuring marketers can respond to these more fluid engagement patterns will bring competitive advantages in brand recognition and gather valuable multi-dimensional insights that single-campaign approaches could never provide. Our panel of destination experts were evenly split on whether agile marketing strategies will replace traditional campaign models, with the predicted level of convergence showing fairly even distribution between traditional campaign-focused strategies and a more integrated approach.
Rethinking Loyalty
The evolution of brand loyalty in tourism reflects broader shifts in visitor behaviour and relationship formation with destinations. In an era of brand doubt, traditional loyalty mechanisms based on transactional rewards are giving way to more refined emotional and experiential connections that transcend single-visit interactions. Rather than purely promotional messaging, destination loyalty increasingly depends on values alignment and authentic experiences. This involves destination marketers developing brand ecosystems that can sustain long-term emotional connections and a sophisticated understanding of how brand loyalty forms among different generations and how to tailor communication to reach them.
With experiences often highly memorable, word-of-mouth and social proof play disproportionately important roles in driving future engagement and recommendation behaviour. At the same time, destination taglines have evolved from simple, memorable phrases to complex identity systems that must function across multiple touchpoints and cultural contexts. The contemporary challenge lies in creating brand identities that remain recognisable across diverse engagement contexts while maintaining relevance and inspiration for increasingly discerning travellers.
Integrated Brand Orchestration
The convergence of campaign intensity and always-on engagement presents compelling opportunities for destination brands to create more cohesive visitor experiences. Finding the equilibrium between both approaches will be key to long-term marketing success through a combined approach to full funnel marketing. With agile always-on content, DMOs are able to tap into trending news and opportunities to boost engagement, such as Visit Benidorm's foray into the AI dolls trend. Integrated approaches enable brands to represent themselves consistently across multiple touchpoints while maintaining the flexibility to intensify engagement during critical moments. This capability can significantly enhance the quality of visitor interactions and make marketing communications more relevant and timely.
While always-on activations result in a short-term uplift in searches and conversion, they risk being a short-sighted strategy that results in declining brand equity. However, sometimes it takes a concentrated impact to penetrate the attention barrier, with paid campaigns focusing on maximising reach and high-quality brand-building that shapes lasting perceptions. Beyond pure promotional messaging, traditional campaign approaches can evolve into comprehensive engagement systems that better support visitor journey complexity and decision-making processes. The ability to orchestrate both campaign intensity and sustained engagement could become a key differentiator in building lasting visitor relationships. On the other hand, by the end of 2024, marketers targeting Gen X (45-60) dropped from 67% to 41%, while those targeting Boomers (61-79) decreased from 27% to 19% in the space of a year, highlighting the importance of adaptive targeting strategies that respond to changing demographic priorities to focus on long-term brand awareness and relevancy.
Strategic Partnership Ecosystems
Taking into account rapid changes in visitor attention spans, especially among the Gen Z (13-28) audience DMOs are increasingly prioritising, the marketing landscape has witnessed a fundamental shift toward collaborative brand ecosystems, where strategic partnerships serve as multipliers for reach and engagement depth. Brand partnerships represent mechanisms for creating authentic touchpoints that transcend traditional advertising boundaries. These collaborative frameworks enable destinations to leverage established brand equity while simultaneously expanding their narrative through carefully designed micro-campaigns that maintain strategic coherence across multiple brand identities.
In 2024, 89% of travellers turned to social media for travel inspiration, highlighting the critical importance of authentic brand collaborations that can penetrate saturated digital environments. The strategic deployment of micro-campaigns through partnership channels allows destinations to simultaneously create multiple engagement vectors, maximising exposure efficiency while maintaining message integrity. Tourism Tasmania's partnership with Jeep and Adventure.com for a week-long EV road trip exploring the state's gastronomic offer is a notable example of where DMOs see opportunities in collaborating with brands outside the tourism sector. By clearly focusing on a specific segment, such a targeted micro-campaign ensures messages are relevant and fine-tuned for the target audience rather than attempting to be a catch-all advertisement that might struggle to convey the same impact due to dilution of the story into a broader narrative.
The collaboration between established lifestyle brands and DMOs exemplifies this strategic pattern, where cultural alignment creates authentic engagement opportunities that feel organic. These partnerships enable destinations to access established audience bases while providing partners with compelling content that enhances their own brand narrative. The key strategic advantage lies in the ability to create multiple touchpoints across different brand ecosystems, amplifying reach while maintaining authentic engagement that resonates with diverse audience segments. The collaboration between Monocle and Visit Portugal for a spring market in London is an example of this, with the pop-up event portraying Portuguese design, gastronomy and culture and supported by broader content activation about the reasons to visit the country. Such small-scale pop-ups are becoming a trendy approach for DMOs to build personal connections with prospective travellers, enabling space for more in-depth conversations with visitors.
Extending beyond traditional media buying strategies for campaign launches, visitor behaviour patterns are simultaneously gravitating toward multi-channel engagement, leading to growing complexity in attribution modelling across these touchpoints. The natural evolution of this trend is the combination of campaign intensity with sustained brand presence. This fusion offers a more comprehensive approach for brands to maintain visibility while maximising impact during critical moments. For marketing teams and strategists, the key challenge lies in ensuring that campaign messaging and always-on content are appropriately coordinated to surface effectively in response to diverse customer intent signals.
With marketing technology platforms now integrating advanced attribution modelling, destination marketers must focus on understanding how to adapt to shifting engagement patterns across different visitor segments. While impressions from social content yield astonishing figures, 85% of views last less than 2.5 seconds and fail to reach the attention-memory threshold required to drive visitors to take an action. Surprisingly, for delivering mass audience attention, TV remains a critical platform, with attention-adjusted Cost Per Mille (CPM) showing that while social content is much cheaper to produce than a full-blown TV advert, the return on investment is much lower, with a CPM of £3.25 compared to £1.19. The rise of streaming platforms, however, illustrates how viewing behaviour has shifted towards on-demand consumption, necessitating a raft of new tools for destinations to establish a much more targeted and data-driven strategy for reaching travellers.
While TV remains an influential channel, content must be emotive and use compelling storytelling that doesn't feel overtly promotional. In sharing messages that visitors are actually searching for, such as the Bermuda Tourism Authority's "Where is Bermuda" video, authenticity shines through and builds a strong connection to drive curiosity to visit among potential visitors. Dynamic campaign optimisation now enables brands to pivot between awareness-building campaigns and conversion-focused activations based on real-time performance data. With budget flexibility as the foundation of understanding marketing effectiveness, this enables DMOs to optimise resource allocation across the entire visitor journey, supported by detailed performance analytics and audience segmentation capabilities. 84% of brands and marketers said they see good results with their Pay Per Click advertising campaigns in 2024, demonstrating the effectiveness of targeted campaign approaches. This further strengthens the connection between strategic planning and tactical execution. Nevertheless, while the method of budget deployment is evolving, the core importance of strategic messaging and brand consistency remains paramount.
Hybrid Campaign Approaches
Despite the enhanced ability for dynamic campaign optimisation, some DMOs have moved away from traditional, one-off campaigns towards a more agile and responsive digital strategy. By the end of 2024, 60% of marketing was digital, signalling a broad shift toward more substantial digital investments as destinations increasingly expect strategic frameworks to act as intelligent systems that understand intent and support both awareness-building and conversion. With this in mind, 99% of marketing teams using an always-on approach rate their programmes as effective, demonstrating that the global marketing ecosystem is moving toward a focus on dynamic and responsive marketing to deliver more contextually relevant results, which will be key to the continued improvement of engagement across diverse customer touchpoints.
Cape Town Tourism's approach exemplifies how dynamic resource allocation can balance content continuity against campaign intensity, helping the city to maintain visibility while maximising impact during peak engagement periods. Instead of waiting to launch a major campaign to drive engagement, embracing an always-on approach through various content formats, including quick-turnaround reels, seasonal guides, neighbourhood spotlights and leveraging real-time insights and user-generated content, the DMO’s dynamic mix of inspiration, utility and authenticity aims to meet the audience in the moment and keep the destination top of mind regardless of whether someone is planning, visiting or dreaming of a trip. In doing so, content is continuously relevant, reactive and meaningful across platforms, adapting alongside the changes in how visitors discover and share travel inspiration.
At the same time, interest in integrated marketing approaches that combine traditional campaign mechanics with persistent engagement methodologies has increased, with marketing orchestration now involving a far more complex budgetary framework. Strategically combining campaign intensity with always-on engagement is expected to lead the way in effective brand building and visitor relationship management across increasingly fragmented digital ecosystems. Good content and always-on activation work in unity to tell quality stories and signal clarity, with this cohesive balance central to shaping long-term marketing strategies. These constant reminders will be vital for providing depth in communication and go beyond the stereotypical visuals portrayed in large-scale campaigns to meaningfully communicate the vibrancy of a destination throughout the year and giving space for the often hidden stories to be shared as a true differentiator of destination selection and cultural immersion.
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