Marketing
Most tourism strategies start with the wrong question.
"What makes our destination unique?" seems like the right place to begin. It's logical, defensible, and will produce an answer that looks a lot like every other destination's answer: natural beauty, rich history, warm hospitality, world-class infrastructure. The brief writes itself. And so does the mediocre campaign that follows.
The best destination marketing strategies I've observed aren't built on uniqueness. They're built on a far more interesting question: who does someone become when they choose us?
That shift, from product to identity, from place to permission, is where the real strategy lives. And the evidence for it sits across four very different destinations, each of which solved a very different problem the same disciplined way.
In 2017, Tourism Australia had a problem that didn't look like a problem. Awareness was high, interest was strong, and yet Australia's share of American outbound travel had stayed flat at around 1.3 per cent for years. So they did something most destination marketers never bother with: they ran a proper funnel diagnosis. The finding was stark. Australia was converting just 30 per cent of considerers into intenders. The UK was converting 58 per cent. The problem wasn't awareness. Distance and cost were killing intention before it could become a booking.
The response was surgical: a Super Bowl spot disguised as a film trailer, featuring Chris Hemsworth and a character called Dundee, targeted directly at high-net-worth American travellers while addressing the practical barriers head-on. Intention to visit rose 80 per cent. Bookings increased 13 per cent.
"The insight wasn't that Australia needed more awareness. It was that the right people weren't being given a believable reason to act."
For years, Fiji marketed itself as the place "where happiness finds you." It worked, after a fashion. But the positioning was passive: happiness as something that happened to you when you arrived, like a lucky weather forecast. After the pandemic, Tourism Fiji recognised that travellers had shifted. Authenticity was now the decisive variable.
The key insight from their research was both simple and uncomfortable: happiness isn't something Fijians switch on for tourists. It's how they actually live. That became the new positioning. Where Happiness Comes Naturally won the City Nation Place Award for Best Communication Strategy in Tourism in 2023. Visitor arrivals ran 50 per cent above forecast in the 2022 recovery year.
What changed wasn't the landscape or the resorts. What changed was whose story was being told, and from whose vantage point. They flipped from tourist experience to Fijian reality. A genuine cultural truth doesn't wear out. A manufactured attraction always does.
In 2022, Dubai merged its Department of Tourism and its Department of Economy into a single body. That organisational decision was itself a strategic declaration: visitors, investors, residents, and businesses are not separate audiences. They are different expressions of the same underlying proposition. The positioning that followed is deceptively simple: the best city to visit, live, and work in. Three verbs. Three audiences. One coherent narrative.
The results are hard to argue with. Dubai recorded 19.59 million international visitors in 2025, its third consecutive record-breaking year, while holding the global number one position for Greenfield Foreign Direct Investment attraction. Tourism and FDI are not separate strategies. They are the same strategy at different stages of the relationship.
"Dubai didn't just market a destination. It built a brand architecture where a visitor is the first step in a longer relationship with the city."
In 2019, Saudi Arabia introduced tourist visas for nationals from 49 countries, opening itself to leisure travellers for the first time in modern history. The Visit Saudi campaign followed. The Welcome to Arabia initiative extended the narrative to every touchpoint, including the national airline's aircraft livery, turning each international flight into a moving declaration of intent.
The sequence matters more than the numbers, though the numbers are extraordinary: 122 million visitors in 2025, $81 billion in tourism spending, and a 69 per cent growth rate in international arrivals since 2019, the highest of any G20 nation. The campaign didn't create the story. The policy reform did. Changing perception required changing reality first, then communicating that change with consistency and at scale. That's not marketing. That's statecraft with a brand strategy attached.
Diagnose before you decide. Australia found its problem in the funnel, not in the brief. Before you write a single word of strategy, map where your audience is actually leaving.
Lead with cultural truth, not tourism formula. The destinations winning right now are the ones anchoring their brand in something that exists whether tourists are there or not. A genuine cultural truth doesn't wear out. A manufactured attraction always does.
Think beyond the visitor. The most sophisticated destination strategies treat tourism as the entry point to a broader economic narrative, where the visitor is the first chapter of a longer relationship the place wants to build with the world. Separate your tourism and investment communications at your peril.
Build a narrative that attracts brand partners. The strongest destination strategies create a gravitational field that pulls in global brands as co-authors. When brands choose to build their most important campaigns in your city, or around your culture's truths, they are endorsing your story with their budgets and their global audiences. That endorsement reaches further, and lands harder, than anything a tourism authority can buy directly.
And finally: narrative is infrastructure. What a country or city says it is, and how it says it, directly shapes who shows up, what they do, whether they stay, and whether the world's best brands want to be part of that story. That's not a marketing problem. That's a strategic one. And the destinations that understand that distinction are the ones setting the pace.
Stay strategic, my friends.
João Ruas