Holidays represent a joyful and special time to connect with loved ones and passions. The anticipation and planning involved are significant, with travellers spending an average of five hours researching and selecting their destination. This dedication underscores the deep emotional investment people make in their travel experiences, with the hope of creating lifelong memories.

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Alice Mansergh, CEO of Tourism Ireland, outlines how a destination brand is bigger than any single organisation, shaped by countless influences such as music, film and historical associations. As a case in point, the popularity received by "Normal People", "Banshees of Inisherin" and "Irish Wish" have all contributed to the perception of Ireland. Stereotypes also play a strong role in destination branding, something that is likely to become increasingly common given the biases being expounded by generative AI. The Irish Emigration Museum's quirky campaign which used AI to generate an image of a typical Irish man and sparked a conversation provides a compelling example of how to tackle such issues in a positive and humorous way.

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Destinations strive to be constantly talked about, with positive coverage and attention a key tool in building intent and enticing travellers to visit. Tourism has substantial economic and social benefits, with 300,000 jobs reliant on tourism in Ireland, with 70% in rural areas outside the main cities of Dublin and Belfast, helping to revitalise communities. Tourism also plays a crucial role in fostering peace in Northern Ireland, with the phrase "peace brings tourism, tourism brings peace" highlighting the positive societal impact of promoting the entire island as a unified destination.

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Building a Brand

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Despite the multitude of benefits brought by tourism, destination marketers do not own the customer interaction, commercial transaction or even their brand. Instead, destination marketing is about teamwork. From airlines and hotels to activity providers, DMOs need to work with partners to communicate about the destination and better understand the dreams of travellers. Tourism Ireland has adopted a multifaceted strategy to achieve this and ensure they remain top-of-mind for potential visitors through building a consistent message and leveraging the strengths of different partner to amplify the impact of destination marketing campaigns.

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Exploration is the primary driver for 80% of travellers to visit somewhere new. For Ireland, the most appealing factors are its beautiful landscapes, the sense of newness for first-time visitors, the rich culture and friendly locals, a desire to revisit and a focus on history and heritage. To capitalise on these themes, Tourism Ireland launched the "Fill Your Heart With Ireland" campaign, which has been viewed hundreds of millions of times worldwide. This campaign leverages cultural influences, featuring well-known Irish personalities across Tourism Ireland's primary markets who share their positive experiences of Ireland’s scenery and people. The success of this approach is undeniable, with a  persuasion score of over 90%, demonstrating how such content creates emotional connections with visitors.

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While advertising is important, credibility is amplified when others speak for the destination. Such content provides an extremely powerful narrative. This is why Tourism Ireland works with journalists and broadcasters to create content that promotes Ireland in a positive light, with an overall reach of 1.5 billion people. Through publicity programmes, Tourism Ireland is currently focused on promoting its sustainability and slow tourism offer. Bringing journalists and broadcasters from around the world to experience the destination, these partnerships provide an authentic way to showcase the country's unique attractions and build interest with diverse audiences. In fact, 80% who recollect communication about Ireland recall positive news. Similarly, working cooperatively with transport companies, Tourism Ireland supports the marketing around the opening of new routes and actively assists their partners to ensure the island can be easily accessed by international travellers.

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Long form content also plays a significant role in effective storytelling. TV shows are a key element of Tourism Ireland’s promotional activity, working with broadcasters to produce exceptional content that places the spotlight on the country. The co-production of "Dermot’s Taste of Ireland" with ITV, a five-part series with Dermot O'Leary, a well-known British TV personality with Irish roots, garnered around two million views. By tracing his roots and exploring Ireland’s culinary scene, this series provided an engaging and personal way to bring Ireland's culture, heritage and hospitality to life within the homes of potential travellers.

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Leveraging Key Moments

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Complementing this hero content, Tourism Ireland strategically promotes seasonal events to capture attention and drive interest in visiting throughout the year. To ensure Ireland stays top of mind, Tourism Ireland embraces quirky and creative marketing tactics to stimulate global conversations around strategic moments.

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As Ireland’s national day, St. Patrick’s Day is a key opportunity to put the destination in the spotlight. Each year, around 100,000 international visitors travel to Ireland to experience the festivities. Historically, the "Global Greening" campaign played a key role in Tourism Ireland's marketing strategy, placing the country in the global spotlight on its national day by illuminating iconic landmarks around the world in green and placing a green dye in rivers. Yet, with a global energy crisis and sustainability concerns, such a campaign was deemed to no longer be appropriate. Instead, a revised approach to mass activations is currently being developed for 2025, something we at the DTTT supported by facilitating a workshop bringing Tourism Ireland's global PR teams together to discuss creative opportunities. To amplify the reach of St. Patrick’s Day, Tourism Ireland invites international journalists and broadcasters to film the festival, which is then broadcast globally. Achieving a reach of over 200 million people globally, with online searches for "Ireland" increasing up to four times during this period, such activations are clearly a successful approach in strategically retaining international visibility.

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Guerilla marketing tactics also play a supporting role in driving awareness of Ireland as an attractive holiday destination. Pop-up events featuring Irish dancers are organised in major cities like Milan, Paris and Madrid, bringing Irish culture directly to an international audience. Tourism Ireland even commissioned Mary Callan, the knitwear designer from the Derry Girls TV show, to create unique and customised jumpers for famous TV presenters that reflect their personal story and connection to Ireland. This tactic resulted in significant media attention, including Laura Whitmore and Dermot O'Leary spending up to six minutes of airtime on national television discussing their love for Ireland.

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It's not just national days that bring substantial marketing value for destinations. Capitalising on the global interest in Halloween and its origins in Celtic culture in Ireland 2,000 years ago, Tourism Ireland launched the "Home of Halloween" campaign to share the story and heritage surrounding this day. Reaching 200 million people, this campaign successfully doubled the number of people who were aware that Halloween started in Ireland and achieved a 70% likelihood of people wanting to visit Ireland. Such phenomenal metrics show why highlighting lesser-known stories also enhance the image of a destination through simultaneously being inspiring and educational and how regularly adding additional elements to the narrative, creates a more complete picture of a place and adding even more reasons why people should visit.

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Changing Media Habits

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Understanding audience behaviour is central to remaining relevant as a brand. With the consumption of media formats undergoing a significant shift, with traditional TV viewership gently declining among 30 to 60-year-olds, while social media and video streaming are experiencing steady growth and are likely to become the top two channels from 2027 onwards. In response to these trends, Tourism Ireland is adapting their strategies to meet travellers where they are spending their entertainment time. This includes leveraging social media platforms to engage with potential visitors and building advocacy to amplify messaging, using real-time testing of images to understand what resonates with audiences and using video streaming to reach people through formats such as short clips and longer-form content.

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This shift is particularly relevant for destination marketing as the online landscape is now where people are now getting their inspiration from. In fact, eight in ten people research and book their trips online. Despite this, highly digital nature in visitor behaviour both before and after a trip, there is an apparent digital paradox in that during the actual trip itself, there is a desire for authentic off-screen experiences. Luxury experiences are now more focused on authenticity and connecting with locals. Playing with this insight, Tourism Ireland produced an advert for the Wild Atlantic Way that integrated the messaging around the tension between how digital we are and how digital we don't want to be on holiday. With such a strong message, built on an awareness of their target audience, campaigns such as these capture attention and make people think and dream about travelling to somewhere that understands their desires.

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Building campaigns around Tourism Ireland's content-first website is crucial for highlighting hidden gems and presenting a more diverse picture of the country, thereby helping to distribute tourism's benefits more widely across the country. This active participation in the travel research phase is essential to ensuring maximum impact. Notably, 33% of visitors to Ireland have been influenced by Tourism Ireland's marketing and publicity programmes, generating a 25:1 return on investment. Leaving the research phase solely to search engines such as Google or TripAdvisor, would instead result in a more homogeneous picture of Ireland because they tend to prioritise the most visited and most talked-about places. Nevertheless, by working with media partners, Tourism Ireland uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to compare millions of data signals about an audiences behaviour to show them the right message, in the right place, at the right time to encourage them to research holidays directly on Tourism Ireland's website.

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On the other hand, the rise of generative AI is also profoundly impacting trip planning. Approximately 30% of Tourism Ireland's overseas audiences are already using generative AI tools to build their travel itineraries. There is even evidence of small activity providers who have experienced a surge in visitors who discovered their business through ChatGPT. This means that businesses and DMOs both need to ensure that the online information available about them is accurate and optimised for these AI tools by placing a strong focus on their web presence and ensuring it is always up-to-date. By doing so, they increase the likelihood of being surfaced to potential visitors when they are researching their trips, with this method of searching only going to become more common in the future.