The average person is now exposed to an estimated 4,000 to 10,000 ads every day. Potential travelers are navigating across Netflix, TikTok, news cycles, gaming and every other channel competing for their focus. Attention is a scarce resource, and for your destination, the competition for it is becoming increasingly harder.
In this article, we’ll explore three ways to earn that attention, build trust and turn interest into action.
Lead With Story
Promotional content tells travelers where to go. Story-driven content makes them want to visit your destination.
The distinction is crucial because attention follows emotion, not information. A 30-second social media reel of a chef explaining the history of a region’s iconic recipe does more for a destination than a list of its go-to dinner spots. A resident showcasing their city—a biker sharing their favorite route, a local exploring a nearby park or an artist venturing through an art district—elicits an emotional response.
For DMOs, this means shifting the creative brief. Instead of asking “where do travelers want to go?” ask “what do we want them to feel?” The content that earns attention in a crowded feed is the content that makes someone pause, which tends to be a real person, specific detail or an unexpected moment that feels authentic.
Disney Cruise Line’s recent ad is a strong example. The spot opens on a father and son sharing a midnight walk on the cruise ship, a tradition that carries forward years later when the son takes his own child on the same walk, his now-older father by his side. Disney earns attention by making the viewer feel something first, then they trust that feeling to carry the rest of the message.
Ask yourself: What’s the story only your destination can tell?
Be Platform-Native
Not all attention is equal. Travelers doom-scrolling through TikTok at midnight are in a different mindset than ones actively searching for weekend getaways on Google. The content that earns attention in each moment can look vastly different.
Platform-native content means building for the channel, not adapting to it. When Tourism Ireland launched their Wild Atlantic Way campaign in 2024, they didn’t produce a new promotional video and push it across their channels. They invited past visitors to take over their official accounts and share real memories using #FillYourHeartWithIreland, content built around how people actually use social media.
For destinations, the question to ask before starting a project is: Where does this live first? That answer should shape the entire process. The pace, the format, the hook, the length. A TikTok series following a local through their day requires a completely different creative approach than a YouTube travel guide. Leaning into each platform’s quirks and its users’ habits turns a scroll into a pause and then into a booking.
Use AI to Sharpen, Not Replace
But today, trust is becoming just as much of a commodity as attention, with 77.9% of consumers saying that they only trust brand videos starring real people. Miles’ Vice President of Data Science, Andria Godfrey, put it this way during our “Unlocking Tourism Data with AI” webinar with TTRA: “AI is meant to augment, not replace.” The opportunity is to use AI where it sharpens your storytelling—speeding up research, drafting variations, scaling personalization—while keeping the authentic human experience that earns traveler trust at the center of your content.
Your destination can draw the line well and open up a new world of creativity and experimentation. Otherwise, your content gets lost in the sea of sameness, which travelers will scroll right past. Some content types are worth keeping AI-free—photography of real people, first-person stories from residents, anything that represents your destination on the ground. And the final piece of content your audience sees should always carry a human touch.
Pressure-test every AI workflow against this question: Where does AI help your storytelling, and where does it risk replacing what your audience actually came for?
The attention economy is here to stay. With the introduction of new platforms and content types, travelers will continue to make decisions across dozens of channels over months of consideration, exposed to thousands of ads in between. The destinations that authentically tell a story worth pausing for, meet travelers where they are and use new tools in ways that strengthen, rather than dilute, traveler trust.
