Smart Travel Marketing Strategies for 2025 (with Examples)
August 15, 2025
Marketing for travel and tourism is a fickle beast. Sure, there are principles from other industries that can work, but impactful travel marketing in 2025 requires a tricky balance of digital engagement, interactivity, and “real life” experiences to keep travellers hooked (or, to quote our founder, “to put heads in beds and butts in seats”).
It’s one thing to get visitors “in the door,” but keeping them engaged before, during, and after their trip is where the magic and the long-term ROI happens.
The good news? Building the right mix of tactics is far easier than it was five or ten years ago. The even better news? With summer still in full swing in North America, there’s plenty of time to brainstorm and launch tourism marketing strategies that can drive traffic and revenue before (and during) shoulder season.
Here are four travel marketing strategies you can steal for 2025, complete with real-world inspiration to show exactly how they work.
Attract Niche Audiences with Themed Trails and Experiences
Themed trails turn a scattered set of attractions into a cohesive, story-driven journey. By linking unique businesses, landscapes, and cultural highlights under a unifying theme, you can:
Boost visitor dwell time
Encourage multi-day stays
Create stronger local partnerships
Build an currated and connected experience for any interest, taste, or experience
Canada’s Badlands has mastered this approach with its “Unearthed” trail. Rather than just mapping out where to eat, sleep, and explore, it curates a journey that stitches together culture, cuisine, and jaw-dropping landscapes.
Day one might see travellers sipping lattes in tiny prairie cafés before stepping into a UNESCO World Heritage Site where dinosaur fossils whisper stories from 75 million years ago. Day two blends high art with small-town charm: theatre performances in Rosebud, vintage treasure hunts, and live music under the Badlands sky.
For destination marketing organizations, this approach does more than create buzz and drive foot traffic. It connects otherwise isolated attractions into a cohesive, marketable experience and transforms a collection of businesses and points of interest into something far more valuable than the sum of its parts.
The takeaway: A well-crafted trail is more than a guide or other one-dimensional travel marketing initiative. It’s a conversion tool that turns casual interest into booked itineraries, and booked itineraries into lifelong advocates.
Think about the points of interest you want to connect across your destination, and build and launch your first trail in less time than you think thanks to a handful of dedicated platforms for just that
Drive Engagement with Challenges and Survey Contests
Survey contests and challenges transform simple promotions into interactive experiences that visitors will actually want to engage with. As a bonus, they capture actionable data your organization can use.
By blending exploration with incentives, you can:
Deepen visitor engagement
Drive revenue
Collect valuable visitor data
Test campaign ideas in real time
Strengthen brand loyalty
The BC Bird Trail’s Surrey Scavenger Hunt is a prime example of a survey contest done right. It guides participants through Surrey’s top birding spots with playful challenges like bingo and trivia, all tied to a prize package. As travellers explore together and the UGC content and social shares roll in, important detailed insights emerge about your most engaged visitors and which strategies resonate the most.
Relatively easy to implement and launch, survey contests keep visitors exploring, spending, and telling you exactly what will bring them back.
Build Post-Trip Loyalty with a Reward Program
Rewards programs turn one-time visits into ongoing relationships. By offering perks tied to exploration, reward programs promote engagement mid and post-trip by offering digital or physical rewards (think t-shirts, digital badges, stickers, etc).
Especially when integrated with an app or mobile experience, reward programs can:
Inspire repeat visits
Keep your brand top-of-mind post-trip
Encourage word of mouth
Drive traffic to owned channels and stores
Improve advocacy and emotional connections post-trip
Take for example the Alberta Ale Trail. Through its app, travellers earn points for checking in at breweries, completing challenges, and conquering curated itineraries. Those points can be redeemed online for exclusive Alberta Ale Trail merchandise, turning every pint into a step toward their next favourite hoodie or cap.
Importantly, reward programs can also extend the visitor experience well beyond the trip itself. It strengthens brand connection, builds loyalty, and keeps your destination in the conversation long after the last check-in.
Building a rewards program with online redemption doesn’t just hand out swag. It transforms visitors into advocates who keep coming back.
Create a Curated Culinary Trail
Culinary trails transform a region’s food culture into a ready-made itinerary that’s as marketable as it is mouthwatering. A specific kind of themed trail, culinary trails weave together a selection of standout eateries under a focused theme.
Endlessly flexible, with a culinary trail you can:
Showcase local flavors and cultural heritage
Encourage exploration across multiple neighborhoods
Extend visitor stays with multi-day tasting opportunities
Attract niche culinary interests by highlighting specific cuisines and hidden gems
The Dumpling Trail in Richmond, BC is likely the prime example of this. Home to one of the highest concentrations of Asian restaurants in North America, Richmond has distilled its culinary diversity into a curated list of 17 eateries serving everything from delicate har gow to Afghan mantu. Visitors can follow themed itineraries, like “Hidden Gems” or “Best Dim Sum”, or create their own route with an interactive map.
The experience is more than just a meal. It’s a deep dive into Richmond’s cultural history, shaped by generations of immigrants who brought their culinary traditions with them. Along the way, travellers discover bustling dim sum halls, hidden gems, and overlooked food courts that locals swear by. Featured on CNN Travel’s “12 of the world’s most enticing food and drink trails,” the Dumpling Trail turns an everyday craving into a destination-worthy adventure.
A well-designed culinary trail can do more than feed visitors — it can define your destination, encourage repeat visits, and create a foodie reputation that travels faster than any ad campaign.
If there’s a thread here, it’s this: the best tourism and travel marketing in 2025 doesn’t feel like marketing. It feels like discovery, like an invitation to take part in something that matters to the place you’re in.
Whether that’s chasing dumplings, earning a pint-fueled hoodie, hunting for birds, or tracing the bones of prehistoric giants, the goal isn’t just to get visitors in the door. It’s to give them a reason to linger, explore, and carry your story home with them.