In September 2022, Visit Sweden did something most tourism boards would never risk. Instead of running a bright, cheerful ad telling people to come see the fjords and the midnight sun, it teamed up with horror author John Ajvide Lindqvist to write a scary story about the creatures that Swedish folklore says live in the forest. The story was called Kiln. You couldn't just click a link and listen to it from your couch. You had to physically travel to one of a small number of Swedish national parks, like Åsnen in Småland or Fulufjället in Dalarna, before the audio would even unlock on Spotify. The whole thing was built around a forest spirit called the huldra, told in the first person, so the listener felt like they were the one walking through the trees.
That is a strange, risky idea for a national tourism campaign. It also worked far better than almost anyone in the industry expected. Over its two month run, the campaign reached roughly 150 million people across its two focus markets, the UK and the US. It landed with 80 percent of the audience Visit Sweden had actually set out to reach, not just a broad general public. And it moved real numbers on the things that matter before someone books a trip: awareness of Sweden as a destination went up by 16 percent, the sense that Sweden is a culturally rich place went up by 14 percent, and stated intention to travel there rose by 5 percent, according to reporting on the campaign by Contagious and the marketing case study coverage that followed.
Those are not the kind of numbers you get from a billboard or a generic print ad. They are the kind of numbers you get when a destination decides to tell a real story about a real place, instead of just putting its name in front of as many eyeballs as possible.
Sweden isn't the only one doing this
Once you start looking, Sweden's approach fits a much bigger pattern showing up across the tourism industry right now. Tourism New Zealand, Visit Saudi Arabia and Visit Qatar have all been named as tourism boards that have moved away from relying only on traditional agency-built ad campaigns, and toward working directly with content creators to produce material in-house, including drone footage and 4K video, according to a 2026 industry guide on influencer marketing in tourism written for destination marketing organizations.
Saudi Arabia's version of this is especially well documented. Between 2022 and 2023 alone, the country's tourism authority worked with an agency to bring more than 300 content creators to Saudi Arabia across 26 separate trips. That effort produced more than eight times the amount of content originally forecast, and generated over 100 million more impressions across Instagram, YouTube and TikTok than the campaign had been expected to deliver. A follow-up brand study by GWI found that 60 percent of people who saw that content said they would now consider booking a trip to Saudi Arabia, something they hadn't been willing to say before seeing it.
Qatar has taken a similar road. Its tourism board launched a campaign called Winter in Qatar 2026, built almost entirely around regional content creators rather than traditional ads, aimed specifically at travelers from the Gulf Cooperation Council countries. That focus matters because GCC visitor arrivals to Qatar had already grown by more than 14 percent in the first half of 2025 compared with the year before, so the campaign was built to serve an audience that was already showing up in growing numbers, not to conjure interest out of nothing.
None of these campaigns look much like each other on the surface. One is a horror story hidden in a forest. Another is hundreds of creators posting from the ground in Saudi Arabia. A third is a regional push aimed squarely at Gulf travelers already primed to visit Qatar. But underneath, they're doing the same three things, and those three things point to exactly what a tourism board is actually paying for when it signs a real promotion partnership today.
It's content built to inform, not an ad built to interrupt
The first thing all of these campaigns have in common is that none of them are advertising in the old sense of the word. An ad interrupts you. It shows up while you're doing something else, states its case in fifteen or thirty seconds, and hopes you remember the name later. What Sweden, Saudi Arabia and Qatar built instead is closer to storytelling: guides, video, audio, editorial writing and social content made to help one specific kind of traveler actually understand a place, in enough detail that they don't need to go searching elsewhere to keep planning.
Sweden's campaign is the clearest example of this. Alongside the audio story, Visit Sweden built out a full section of its website explaining the folklore behind creatures like the huldra, the nightmare-spirit known as the nattmara, and the trolls that Swedish children grow up hearing about. That content wasn't short. In some markets, people spent up to ten minutes reading it, well above what the agency had benchmarked for that kind of content, according to the same Contagious reporting. People weren't skimming past a logo. They were sitting with the material because it gave them something worth their attention: real cultural context, tied to real forests they could actually visit, like Åsnen and Fulufjället national parks.
That's the difference between promotion and storytelling in a nutshell. Promotion tells you a place is worth visiting. Storytelling shows you why, with enough specific, usable detail that the interest you feel while reading or listening can turn straight into an actual travel plan. Saudi Arabia's creator trips work on the same logic, just with a different format. Instead of one scripted story, you get hundreds of individual creators showing their own honest reaction to the country, filmed on location, often in places that hadn't seen many tourists before. Different execution, same underlying idea: give people something real to look at and read, not just a message to notice.
It's targeting built around people who are already close to booking
The second pattern is just as important, and it's easy to miss if you only look at the big reach numbers. None of these campaigns were built to reach as many people as technically possible. They were built to reach a specific, carefully chosen group of people who were already leaning toward the kind of trip being sold.
Sweden's 80 percent reach figure only means something once you understand what it was measured against. That 80 percent wasn't 80 percent of the general population of the UK and US. It was 80 percent of a target audience Visit Sweden had already defined ahead of time, made up of people already interested in dark tourism, folklore, mysticism and the kind of offbeat, nature-heavy travel that fits Sweden's brand. Hitting 80 percent of a well-chosen group is a completely different achievement than hitting a small slice of everyone.
Qatar's Winter 2026 campaign is even more direct about this. It wasn't built for a global audience at all. It was built specifically for GCC travelers, a group that was already visiting Qatar in growing numbers, up more than 14 percent year over year in the first half of 2025. Rather than spending money trying to convince people who had never thought about Qatar, the campaign put its budget behind reinforcing and accelerating a trend that was already happening among people close to the region.
This is the part of the pattern that a lot of destinations get backwards. There's a real temptation to chase the biggest possible reach number, because a big number is easy to put in a report and easy to feel good about. But reach without relevance mostly wastes a budget. The tourism boards getting real results in 2026 are pairing their storytelling with narrow, deliberate targeting, aimed at reducing friction at the exact moment someone is deciding whether to actually book a flight, rather than spending most of the money on the much bigger, much less useful job of making random people vaguely aware that a country exists.
It's a partner that reduces uncertainty, not just unfamiliarity
The third pattern is the one that explains why creator-led, in-house content has become so central to tourism marketing specifically, as opposed to marketing in general. It comes down to a simple distinction: awareness and confidence are not the same thing.
Someone can already know that Uganda, Kenya, Seychelles or Mauritius exist as places you can visit, and still never book a trip there, because knowing a place exists doesn't tell you what it's actually like, what a day there looks like, what to pack, what it costs, or whether it's safe and comfortable for someone like them. That gap between knowing about a place and feeling ready to go is uncertainty, and it's a completely different problem than unfamiliarity. You don't close it with a bigger ad. You close it with specific, trustworthy, on-the-ground information, ideally delivered by someone the traveler already has some reason to trust.
That's exactly why Saudi Arabia leaned so heavily on hundreds of individual creators rather than a single polished campaign film. Each creator brings their own audience, an audience that already follows them and already trusts their opinion about food, hotels, safety and day-to-day travel logistics. When one of those creators posts honest footage from a trip to Saudi Arabia, it does more to close a viewer's uncertainty than the same information delivered as a paid ad ever could, because it's coming from a source the viewer already believes. The 60 percent jump in people saying they'd now consider booking a Saudi Arabia trip, found in that GWI brand study, is a direct measure of uncertainty being closed, not just awareness being raised.
Tourism New Zealand and Qatar are working from the same insight, even though their execution looks different. Building content in-house, including drone and 4K video shot on location, gives a destination direct control over showing real places in real detail, rather than relying on stock footage or a generic ad template. And routing that content through creators, rather than only through official brand channels, means it arrives wrapped in a layer of trust the destination itself can't manufacture on its own.
There's also a practical reason this approach has become more common, not just a creative one. Drone and 4K equipment has gotten cheap enough that a tourism board can shoot high quality aerial footage of a coastline, a mountain range or a city skyline without needing the budget of a traditional TV commercial. That means a destination can produce a much larger volume of specific, location-based content, covering dozens of individual towns, trails or neighborhoods, rather than one expensive hero video that tries to represent an entire country in ninety seconds. More volume means more chances to answer the exact question a specific traveler actually has, whether that's what a hike near Queenstown looks like in winter, what a souk in Doha feels like at night, or what a national park in Småland looks like once the sun goes down.
What this means for a tourism board evaluating a partner
If you pull these three patterns together, they point to a pretty clear set of questions a tourism board should actually be asking before it signs a promotion partnership in 2026.
The old question, how many people will see this, is still worth asking, but it shouldn't be the main one anymore, and on its own it can be actively misleading. A campaign can reach hundreds of millions of people and still fail to move a single booking, if it's reaching the wrong people with the wrong kind of message. The more useful questions look a lot more like this:
Who is the audience this partner already has a real relationship with, and does that audience actually overlap with the kind of traveler this destination is trying to attract? A partner with millions of followers who have no interest in the type of trip being sold isn't actually useful, no matter how big the number looks in a proposal.
What will this partner actually produce, beyond simple ad placement? Sweden commissioned an original audio story and a full body of written cultural content. Saudi Arabia sent hundreds of creators out to film real, unscripted material on the ground. Qatar and New Zealand built video and creator content in-house rather than buying a generic media package. In every case, the destination ended up owning or at least benefiting from a real body of content, not just a temporary slot in someone's feed.
And, most importantly, how does this content actually help one specific traveler move from being curious about a place to being ready to book a flight? That means thinking about what information is still missing for that traveler, what would make them feel confident rather than just aware, and whether the partner's content is built to answer that or just built to look good in a highlight reel.
Destinations that are getting real, measurable results from their partnerships right now, from Sweden's forest folklore to Saudi Arabia's creator trips to Qatar's regionally targeted campaign, are the ones that asked exactly these questions before signing anything, and found partners who could actually deliver on the answers.
It's also worth being honest about what this approach costs and what it doesn't guarantee. None of these campaigns worked because they were cheap or fast. Sweden spent two months building and running a single, carefully crafted story rather than churning out constant content. Saudi Arabia's push involved 26 separate trips and hundreds of individual creators over roughly two years, which takes real coordination, not just a signed contract and a wired payment. Qatar's campaign only makes sense because it was matched to a market, GCC travelers, that was already growing on its own. A destination that copies the format without doing the same groundwork, picking the wrong audience, skipping the research, or treating a creator partnership as a one-off transaction instead of an ongoing relationship, is unlikely to see the same results. The tactics are copyable. The discipline behind choosing the right audience and the right story is not.
That's really the whole point about what a tourism promotion partnership is worth today. It's not about buying the biggest possible audience anymore. It's about buying a story specific enough, targeted enough, and trustworthy enough to actually close the gap between someone hearing about a place and someone booking a trip there. A tourism board that understands this going into a negotiation is going to ask very different questions than one that's still measuring success by impressions alone, and based on the campaigns above, it's going to get very different results too.
Sources
- Contagious, "Swedish tourism board targets myth-seekers with audio tales," reporting on the Spellbound by Sweden campaign results (150 million reach, 80 percent target audience, awareness and intent lift figures)
- Visit Sweden, "Spellbound by Sweden," official campaign page describing the Kiln audio story and its folklore basis
- Travel Weekly, "Sweden showcases its spellbinding forests with spooky new campaign"
- Forbes, "Visit Sweden's New Campaign Is Spellbinding, And You Have To Be There To Hear It"
- Influencer.com, Saudi Tourism Authority case study (creator trip numbers, impressions, GWI consideration study)
- Travel and Tour World, "Qatar Tourism Targets GCC Visitors With A Dynamic Winter 2026 Campaign Driven By Popular Influencers"
- ConnectingTravel, "Qatar Tourism launches influencer-led winter 2026 campaign"
- Max Haase, "Influencer Marketing in Tourism 2026: Costs, ROI & Case Studies for DMOs"