From Brochures to Algorithms: How Destination Marketing Has Evolved

It’s National Tourism Week in Canada and I’ve been reminiscing about one of my earliest career roles, working for the Quebec Ministry of Tourism proofreading official publications in both English and French. It was a great gig.

At a young age, it was inspiring and it felt like travelling by proxy. I discovered parts of the province I didn’t even know existed, from vast natural landscapes to hidden gems amid the bustle of vibrant Montreal. It was my first real glimpse into how places promote themselves.

Back then, I wasn’t writing the copy. But I was reading every description, every landmark, every suggested itinerary. And it stuck with me.

The way destinations are marketed has evolved over the years. Platforms change. Formats change. Audience awareness changes. But one thing remains the same: places need to light a fire in people. They need to stir curiosity and earn a place on someone’s bucket list. They need to compete in a world saturated with destinations, visuals and enticing content.

Big or small, destination marketing still has to be evocative, relatable and aspirational. That’s what makes people imagine themselves there. And once that spark's there, the journey often follows.

From a destination marketing perspective today, what's changed most is not the intention, but the environment in which that intention has to land.

In the 80s and 90s, destination marketing lived in a relatively controlled ecosystem. Travel brochures, printed guides, carefully curated photography (that feels quite ordinary now), and the occasional television campaign. The visual language was slower and almost academic at times. A glossy double-page spread of a coastline at sunset or a neatly composed city square could carry enormous persuasive weight because it wasn’t competing with thousands of other stimuli at the same time.

The copy was similarly structured. Long-form descriptions, often formal in tone, were designed to inform more than inspire. There was space for detail, for geography, for the practicalities of travel. You could afford to explain a place before asking someone to imagine themselves in it.

Today, audiences are no longer introduced to places. They're flooded with them. We're operating in an environment where destinations are constantly present in feeds, search results, short-form video, influencer content, programmatic ads, and algorithmically driven inspiration that follows people long after they’ve shown the slightest interest in a region, a hotel, or even a single image of a coastline.

It's an even mix of opportunity and distortion. On one hand, destinations can reach audiences at a scale and precision that was unimaginable decades ago. A small region can now compete visually with global cities. A hidden village can become a viral moment overnight. Inspiration is no longer gatekept by traditional publishing cycles.

On the other hand, audiences are experiencing what can only be described as content saturation. The modern traveller isn't simply choosing between destinations. They're navigating an endless stream of curated desire, often shaped by algorithms that prioritise engagement patterns, previous searches, and behavioural signals. In this sense, travel aspiration is no longer entirely self-directed. It's partially constructed through repetition and visibility.

This shift has had a profound impact on how destinations must now communicate.

Photography, for example, has moved from being illustrative to being immersive. The expectation is no longer just beauty, but experience. Highly polished imagery still has its place, particularly in luxury positioning, but it now sits alongside raw, experiential content: movement, atmosphere, sound, imperfection, lived moments. A static image of a landmark is just not enough anymore. People want to feel what it's like to stand there. The reality is, when they do stand there themselves, they'll forget to take it all in and spend the whole time videoing to post to their social media, so they need to see it before they see it? Strange but true.

Language has also changed. The formal brochure tone has given way to something more conversational, more immediate, and more emotionally responsive. Instead of describing a destination as it is, we now often describe how it feels. The shift is significant; it moves marketing from information delivery to emotional invitation.

Despite all of this evolution, the core challenge remains unchanged. A destination still has to mean something to someone.

It still has to interrupt the noise. It still has to create a moment of recognition, desire, or curiosity strong enough to cut through everything else competing for attention. Whether that comes from a beautifully written itinerary in a printed guide or a ten-second social clip in a vertical feed, the principle is the same: relevance must be felt, not just seen.

For me personally, I often return to those early days working in tourism publishing. We didn't call it content back then, just assets and copy. In many ways, it was deceptively simple compared to today’s ecosystem. Most of all, I think we had time. The biggest changes are the scale, the speed, and the noise in which we're all trying to achieve anything.

Perhaps that's where the opportunity now lies for destination marketing teams: not in producing more content, but in creating clarity within it. In building narratives that feel intentional rather than rushed and reactive. In resisting the pull of purely algorithmic storytelling in favour of something more grounded, more human, and more enduring.

At Common Goal Creative, we continue to work in the tourism and destination sphere to develop this kind of content strategy and storytelling. Work that respects where audiences are now, and understands what still genuinely moves them. And of course, we play with the algorithm as much as we can to tell people what they want.

We're very open to expanding that work with destinations looking to refine how they show up in an increasingly crowded and competitive space.

CONTACT CGC FOR MORE INFO