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In 2016, a tiny North Atlantic nation strapped cameras to its sheep to embarrass Google into putting it on the map. Two weeks later, the hotels in its capital were sold out.
That's the bar for travel advertising. Pretty footage of a beach is easy. Moving bookings is the hard part, and the travel campaigns below did both: they won the industry's praise and they filled seats and rooms.
Here are 10 travel ad campaigns worth studying in 2026, with the results they drove and the idea you can borrow from each. A few are recent, a few are modern classics, and one is a brand-new model that might be where tourism marketing is heading.
What makes travel advertising work
The strongest travel campaigns tend to share a few traits. They sell a feeling more than a place. They engineer earned media so the press and the public spread the message for free. They often hand the camera to real people or real personalities. And the best tourism campaigns measure success in visits and revenue, not just views. Keep those traits in mind as you read, because they're the foundation of nearly every creative travel advertisement on this list.
1. Tourism Australia, "Dundee"
Ahead of Super Bowl LII in 2018, Tourism Australia ran a fake movie trailer for a Crocodile Dundee reboot, complete with Hollywood cast, then revealed during the game that the "film" was a tourism ad for Australia.
The $36 million push aimed to add an extra $860 million to the economy. It delivered: American spending in Australia climbed about 30%, and the stunt earned a Super Bowl-sized wave of coverage for a fraction of repeated ad buys. The lesson: a single big swing, set up with a believable misdirect, can outperform a year of straight ads.
2. Visit Iceland, "OutHorse Your Email"
Iceland has quietly run one of the smartest tourism playbooks in the world since its 2010 "Inspired by Iceland" recovery effort, which ran 27% above visitor forecasts and added £138.7 million to the economy after a volcanic eruption scared travelers off.
The 2022 follow-up is the one people remember. OutHorse Your Email let vacationers hand their work inbox to a giant keyboard pecked at by an Icelandic horse, a joke about always-on culture aimed at burned-out professionals. It pulled 3.7 billion impressions, $6.8 million in earned media, and a 16.8% lift in US travel intent. The lesson: solve a real emotional problem your traveler has (here, the inability to disconnect), and the product sells itself.
3. Visit Faroe Islands, "Sheep View 360"
With almost no budget, Visit Faroe Islands strapped 360-degree cameras to its sheep and published the footage, publicly nudging Google to bring Street View to the islands it had ignored.
Google noticed, sent a crew, and the underdog story spread worldwide. Within two weeks, hotels in the capital Tórshavn were sold out, and visitor numbers climbed roughly 30% over the following years. The lesson: a clever provocation aimed at a giant brand can buy a small destination millions in attention it could never afford outright.
4. Go Vilnius, "The G-Spot of Europe"
In 2018, Lithuania's capital decided to stop being the city nobody could place. Go Vilnius launched "The G-Spot of Europe," a deliberately racy slogan paired with the line "nobody knows where it is, but when you find it, it's amazing."
The risk paid off. The campaign reached around 600 million people across more than 1,000 publications, Google searches for the city tripled, tourism rose about 12%, and it took home an International Travel and Tourism Gold Award. It remains one of the boldest tourism campaigns of the last decade. The lesson: a provocative idea that's genuinely funny travels further than a polished one that's safe.
5. Switzerland Tourism, "No Drama"
Switzerland Tourism paired Roger Federer with Robert De Niro in a series of comedy films where the tennis star tries to recruit a reluctant De Niro to co-star in a Swiss tourism movie, while the scenery does the real convincing.
The films hit a click-through rate as high as 3.5%, lifted ad recall 15.1%, and landed in the top 10 of the Cannes YouTube Ads Leaderboard. Switzerland Tourism called the Federer partnership its most successful global campaign. The numbers here are engagement and recall rather than published bookings, so treat it as a masterclass in attention. The lesson: star power works when the celebrity fits the brand's tone, and humor keeps a glossy destination ad from feeling like a postcard.
6. WestJet, "Christmas Miracle"
\Canadian airline WestJet asked boarding passengers what they wanted for Christmas, then surprised them with those exact gifts waiting on the baggage carousel when they landed, all filmed for a video that drew more than 35 million views.
The goodwill converted. WestJet reported sales up 86%, bookings up 77%, and site visits up 100% versus the prior year, and later editions of the campaign drove $8 to $11 million in direct sales. The lesson: a genuine emotional moment, captured well, can move hard revenue numbers, not just sentiment.
7. Airbnb, "Icons"
In 2024, Airbnb launched Icons, a category of once-impossible stays: a night in the house from Up, floated by balloons, or a sleepover in the Ferrari Museum. Each drop generated its own news cycle.
The work swept the awards circuit with four Cannes Lions and 11 major wins across the year. Airbnb has been candid that Icons is a brand investment measured in awareness and buzz rather than a single bookings line. The lesson: scarcity plus spectacle creates earned media, and a brand with scale can afford to play the long game on perception.
8. Explore Minnesota, "Bring Ya A**"
During the 2024 NBA playoffs, Timberwolves star Anthony Edwards told a skeptical Charles Barkley, who had just admitted he hadn't visited in over 20 years, to "bring ya a** to Minnesota" on live TV. The clip went viral within minutes.
Explore Minnesota, the state's tourism board, leaned into the unfiltered line instead of running from it. It adopted "Bring Ya A**" as a tourism hook across social and digital, a fan bought bringyaass.com and pointed it straight at the Explore Minnesota homepage, and even the governor floated swapping the official state slogan for it.
The move flipped the polite "Minnesota Nice" cliché on its head and turned a throwaway sports quote into the state's most talked-about tourism invite in years. The payoff was earned media and attention rather than a published bookings number, which is the honest read on a moment like this. The lesson: when the internet hands you a moment, speed and a sense of humor beat a focus group.
9. Ryanair on TikTok
Low-cost airline Ryanair has spent years building travel's most-watched social account on a diet of self-deprecating memes, a googly-eyed talking-plane filter, and blunt replies to passenger complaints, good for 2.1 million TikTok followers and 33.6 million likes, almost all of it organic.
In 2026 it found the perfect foil. After Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary called Elon Musk "an idiot" in a row over fitting Starlink WiFi to its planes, Musk hit back on X, branding O'Leary an "utter idiot" and "imbecile." Instead of a careful corporate reply, Ryanair launched "The Big Idiot Seat Sale," 100,000 seats from £16.99, posted in its trademark MS-Paint house style with lines like "Buy now before Musk gets one!!!" and even hand-delivered a free ticket to X's Dublin office. The stunt cost next to nothing and turned a public insult into days of free attention for the airline and its routes. The lesson: a brand with a confident voice can flip an attack into its best ad of the year, as long as it moves in hours, not weeks.
10. Canary Islands Tourism, "An Island of You"
The newest idea on this list barely looks like advertising. As Forbes reported in 2026, Canary Islands Tourism co-produced "A Una Isla De Ti" (An Island of You), a fully financed romantic comedy set across the islands, rather than buying another round of ads.
The film already has an HBO Max streaming window in Spain with international sales underway, and it's built as a long-term platform that can expand into food, rural life, and culture over time. Results on visitation are still to come, so this one is a bet rather than a proven win. The lesson: branded entertainment that funds joy, not interruption, can reposition a destination in a way a 30-second spot never could.
What travel brands can borrow in 2026
Strip these tourism campaigns down and the same moves repeat. Sell a feeling. Manufacture earned media instead of paying for every impression. Let real people and real personalities carry the message. Match any celebrity to the brand's actual tone. And measure the work in visits and revenue, because awards don't fill rooms. That short list of travel marketing ideas is as close as the industry gets to a repeatable formula behind the best tourism marketing campaigns.
One thread connects almost all of them: a lot of strong video. That used to be a big-budget privilege, which is why these lists skew toward national tourism boards and airlines. AI video tools have lowered that barrier. A platform like Creatify lets a hotel, tour operator, or regional board turn a location or listing into platform-ready video ads in dozens of languages, with formats for social and connected TV, without a Super Bowl line item. The best travel advertising campaigns above show what a big swing looks like. The point for a smaller travel brand is that you can now take more of them.
Read also: How to make an ad that drives real results
Frequently Asked Questions
What makes a good travel ad campaign?
The best travel ad campaigns sell an emotion rather than a list of features, generate earned media so the story spreads for free, and tie back to real outcomes like bookings and visitation. A clear, distinctive idea matters more than production budget, as the Faroe Islands and Vilnius campaigns show.
What are the best tourism campaigns of all time?
Frequently cited best tourism campaigns include Tourism Australia's "Dundee" Super Bowl stunt, Iceland's "Inspired by Iceland" and "OutHorse Your Email," the Faroe Islands' "Sheep View 360," and Vilnius's "G-Spot of Europe." Each combined a memorable creative idea with measurable lifts in spending, search, or visitation.
How do tourism boards measure whether a campaign filled seats and rooms?
They track metrics like visitor arrivals, hotel room nights, visitor spending, search interest in the destination, and travel intent surveys, often comparing campaign periods against forecasts or prior years. Tourism Australia's Dundee campaign, for example, was judged on incremental American visitor spending.
What are some low-budget travel marketing ideas?
Low-budget travel marketing ideas that have worked include earned-media stunts (the Faroe Islands' sheep cameras), provocative slogans (Vilnius), and a strong, consistent social personality (Ryanair on TikTok). The common factor is a distinctive idea plus organic reach, not a large media spend.
What makes a creative travel advertisement stand out in 2026?
A creative travel advertisement stands out when it offers something people want to share, whether that's humor, spectacle, or genuine emotion, and increasingly when it's produced as video tailored to each platform and audience. Branded entertainment, like Canary Islands Tourism's feature film, is an emerging way to stand out beyond the standard ad format.
In 2016, a tiny North Atlantic nation strapped cameras to its sheep to embarrass Google into putting it on the map. Two weeks later, the hotels in its capital were sold out.
That's the bar for travel advertising. Pretty footage of a beach is easy. Moving bookings is the hard part, and the travel campaigns below did both: they won the industry's praise and they filled seats and rooms.
Here are 10 travel ad campaigns worth studying in 2026, with the results they drove and the idea you can borrow from each. A few are recent, a few are modern classics, and one is a brand-new model that might be where tourism marketing is heading.
What makes travel advertising work
The strongest travel campaigns tend to share a few traits. They sell a feeling more than a place. They engineer earned media so the press and the public spread the message for free. They often hand the camera to real people or real personalities. And the best tourism campaigns measure success in visits and revenue, not just views. Keep those traits in mind as you read, because they're the foundation of nearly every creative travel advertisement on this list.
1. Tourism Australia, "Dundee"
Ahead of Super Bowl LII in 2018, Tourism Australia ran a fake movie trailer for a Crocodile Dundee reboot, complete with Hollywood cast, then revealed during the game that the "film" was a tourism ad for Australia.
The $36 million push aimed to add an extra $860 million to the economy. It delivered: American spending in Australia climbed about 30%, and the stunt earned a Super Bowl-sized wave of coverage for a fraction of repeated ad buys. The lesson: a single big swing, set up with a believable misdirect, can outperform a year of straight ads.
2. Visit Iceland, "OutHorse Your Email"
Iceland has quietly run one of the smartest tourism playbooks in the world since its 2010 "Inspired by Iceland" recovery effort, which ran 27% above visitor forecasts and added £138.7 million to the economy after a volcanic eruption scared travelers off.
The 2022 follow-up is the one people remember. OutHorse Your Email let vacationers hand their work inbox to a giant keyboard pecked at by an Icelandic horse, a joke about always-on culture aimed at burned-out professionals. It pulled 3.7 billion impressions, $6.8 million in earned media, and a 16.8% lift in US travel intent. The lesson: solve a real emotional problem your traveler has (here, the inability to disconnect), and the product sells itself.
3. Visit Faroe Islands, "Sheep View 360"
With almost no budget, Visit Faroe Islands strapped 360-degree cameras to its sheep and published the footage, publicly nudging Google to bring Street View to the islands it had ignored.
Google noticed, sent a crew, and the underdog story spread worldwide. Within two weeks, hotels in the capital Tórshavn were sold out, and visitor numbers climbed roughly 30% over the following years. The lesson: a clever provocation aimed at a giant brand can buy a small destination millions in attention it could never afford outright.
4. Go Vilnius, "The G-Spot of Europe"
In 2018, Lithuania's capital decided to stop being the city nobody could place. Go Vilnius launched "The G-Spot of Europe," a deliberately racy slogan paired with the line "nobody knows where it is, but when you find it, it's amazing."
The risk paid off. The campaign reached around 600 million people across more than 1,000 publications, Google searches for the city tripled, tourism rose about 12%, and it took home an International Travel and Tourism Gold Award. It remains one of the boldest tourism campaigns of the last decade. The lesson: a provocative idea that's genuinely funny travels further than a polished one that's safe.
5. Switzerland Tourism, "No Drama"
Switzerland Tourism paired Roger Federer with Robert De Niro in a series of comedy films where the tennis star tries to recruit a reluctant De Niro to co-star in a Swiss tourism movie, while the scenery does the real convincing.
The films hit a click-through rate as high as 3.5%, lifted ad recall 15.1%, and landed in the top 10 of the Cannes YouTube Ads Leaderboard. Switzerland Tourism called the Federer partnership its most successful global campaign. The numbers here are engagement and recall rather than published bookings, so treat it as a masterclass in attention. The lesson: star power works when the celebrity fits the brand's tone, and humor keeps a glossy destination ad from feeling like a postcard.
6. WestJet, "Christmas Miracle"
\Canadian airline WestJet asked boarding passengers what they wanted for Christmas, then surprised them with those exact gifts waiting on the baggage carousel when they landed, all filmed for a video that drew more than 35 million views.
The goodwill converted. WestJet reported sales up 86%, bookings up 77%, and site visits up 100% versus the prior year, and later editions of the campaign drove $8 to $11 million in direct sales. The lesson: a genuine emotional moment, captured well, can move hard revenue numbers, not just sentiment.
7. Airbnb, "Icons"
In 2024, Airbnb launched Icons, a category of once-impossible stays: a night in the house from Up, floated by balloons, or a sleepover in the Ferrari Museum. Each drop generated its own news cycle.
The work swept the awards circuit with four Cannes Lions and 11 major wins across the year. Airbnb has been candid that Icons is a brand investment measured in awareness and buzz rather than a single bookings line. The lesson: scarcity plus spectacle creates earned media, and a brand with scale can afford to play the long game on perception.
8. Explore Minnesota, "Bring Ya A**"
During the 2024 NBA playoffs, Timberwolves star Anthony Edwards told a skeptical Charles Barkley, who had just admitted he hadn't visited in over 20 years, to "bring ya a** to Minnesota" on live TV. The clip went viral within minutes.
Explore Minnesota, the state's tourism board, leaned into the unfiltered line instead of running from it. It adopted "Bring Ya A**" as a tourism hook across social and digital, a fan bought bringyaass.com and pointed it straight at the Explore Minnesota homepage, and even the governor floated swapping the official state slogan for it.
The move flipped the polite "Minnesota Nice" cliché on its head and turned a throwaway sports quote into the state's most talked-about tourism invite in years. The payoff was earned media and attention rather than a published bookings number, which is the honest read on a moment like this. The lesson: when the internet hands you a moment, speed and a sense of humor beat a focus group.
9. Ryanair on TikTok
Low-cost airline Ryanair has spent years building travel's most-watched social account on a diet of self-deprecating memes, a googly-eyed talking-plane filter, and blunt replies to passenger complaints, good for 2.1 million TikTok followers and 33.6 million likes, almost all of it organic.
In 2026 it found the perfect foil. After Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary called Elon Musk "an idiot" in a row over fitting Starlink WiFi to its planes, Musk hit back on X, branding O'Leary an "utter idiot" and "imbecile." Instead of a careful corporate reply, Ryanair launched "The Big Idiot Seat Sale," 100,000 seats from £16.99, posted in its trademark MS-Paint house style with lines like "Buy now before Musk gets one!!!" and even hand-delivered a free ticket to X's Dublin office. The stunt cost next to nothing and turned a public insult into days of free attention for the airline and its routes. The lesson: a brand with a confident voice can flip an attack into its best ad of the year, as long as it moves in hours, not weeks.
10. Canary Islands Tourism, "An Island of You"
The newest idea on this list barely looks like advertising. As Forbes reported in 2026, Canary Islands Tourism co-produced "A Una Isla De Ti" (An Island of You), a fully financed romantic comedy set across the islands, rather than buying another round of ads.
The film already has an HBO Max streaming window in Spain with international sales underway, and it's built as a long-term platform that can expand into food, rural life, and culture over time. Results on visitation are still to come, so this one is a bet rather than a proven win. The lesson: branded entertainment that funds joy, not interruption, can reposition a destination in a way a 30-second spot never could.
What travel brands can borrow in 2026
Strip these tourism campaigns down and the same moves repeat. Sell a feeling. Manufacture earned media instead of paying for every impression. Let real people and real personalities carry the message. Match any celebrity to the brand's actual tone. And measure the work in visits and revenue, because awards don't fill rooms. That short list of travel marketing ideas is as close as the industry gets to a repeatable formula behind the best tourism marketing campaigns.
One thread connects almost all of them: a lot of strong video. That used to be a big-budget privilege, which is why these lists skew toward national tourism boards and airlines. AI video tools have lowered that barrier. A platform like Creatify lets a hotel, tour operator, or regional board turn a location or listing into platform-ready video ads in dozens of languages, with formats for social and connected TV, without a Super Bowl line item. The best travel advertising campaigns above show what a big swing looks like. The point for a smaller travel brand is that you can now take more of them.
Read also: How to make an ad that drives real results
Frequently Asked Questions
What makes a good travel ad campaign?
The best travel ad campaigns sell an emotion rather than a list of features, generate earned media so the story spreads for free, and tie back to real outcomes like bookings and visitation. A clear, distinctive idea matters more than production budget, as the Faroe Islands and Vilnius campaigns show.
What are the best tourism campaigns of all time?
Frequently cited best tourism campaigns include Tourism Australia's "Dundee" Super Bowl stunt, Iceland's "Inspired by Iceland" and "OutHorse Your Email," the Faroe Islands' "Sheep View 360," and Vilnius's "G-Spot of Europe." Each combined a memorable creative idea with measurable lifts in spending, search, or visitation.
How do tourism boards measure whether a campaign filled seats and rooms?
They track metrics like visitor arrivals, hotel room nights, visitor spending, search interest in the destination, and travel intent surveys, often comparing campaign periods against forecasts or prior years. Tourism Australia's Dundee campaign, for example, was judged on incremental American visitor spending.
What are some low-budget travel marketing ideas?
Low-budget travel marketing ideas that have worked include earned-media stunts (the Faroe Islands' sheep cameras), provocative slogans (Vilnius), and a strong, consistent social personality (Ryanair on TikTok). The common factor is a distinctive idea plus organic reach, not a large media spend.
What makes a creative travel advertisement stand out in 2026?
A creative travel advertisement stands out when it offers something people want to share, whether that's humor, spectacle, or genuine emotion, and increasingly when it's produced as video tailored to each platform and audience. Branded entertainment, like Canary Islands Tourism's feature film, is an emerging way to stand out beyond the standard ad format.
