Warm Hearts and Even Warmer Results: Travel Manitoba’s Successful Fall and Winter Marketing Campaign

The results are in and our 2025-26 fall and winter marketing campaigns have generated nearly 300 million social media impressions and $5.77 million in airline and hotel bookings, bringing more awareness and visitors to experience our breathtaking northern lights, polar bears and amazing winter accommodations and attractions.

This year, we ran a focused recovery campaign which launched in earnest in September to November with our Your Heart...Right Place slogan. Showcasing areas affected by the recent wildfires and ready to welcome back visitors, the campaign included Flair Airlines seatback ad placements, special ads in Game On and Foodism/Escapism magazines as well as a 30 second spot in Cineplex Theatres and an advertorial in the National Post. Sojern, a travel marketing platform, measured visitor bookings connected to and influenced by our advertising with WestJet and United Airlines that generated an estimated $263,000 in revenue and nearly 100 flight bookings and 170 room nights.

The regular fall and winter leisure campaign ran from November into March of 2026. We continued working with Sojern (who acquired a similar company called Adara), TripAdvisor, Expedia and Air Canada. We were able to track how our $1.1 million investment generated nearly 25,000 in hotel and 4,600 airline bookings. That translates into an increase of 60 per cent in hotel bookings and a 35 per cent uptick in airline tickets from what we recorded during the same period last year. By working with different partners like Sojern, we were able to use technology to track our leads and measure the impact our marketing has on visitation.

Expedia clocked over 1.3 million impressions between fall and winter, while Sojern tracked 11.5 million overall impressions and Air Canada reported 12 million paid media impressions, showing our awareness efforts are reaching potential visitors. To complement our top funnel efforts, our marketing also brought over 85,397 leads to our tourism business partners to close the sale.

Printed marketing materials remained an important channel. We distributed 50,500 Northern Lures to targeted Manitoba households, showcasing amazing winter experiences. Nearly 250,000 Inspiration Guides arrived in mailboxes across Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Northwest Ontario in March. We also distributed the guides in Fargo and Grand Forks, North Dakota through inserts into local newspapers. The guides are in a new two-year format and are also available through the Visitor Services Network, regional tourism organizations and Red River Co-ops.

We continued our national partnership with Destination Canada along with Tourism Yukon and Northwest Territories Tourism to extend our reach and marketing dollars on a northern lights campaign that generated 71 million overall impressions, 14 million clicks to the campaign landing page and 30,000 more clicks directly to our website.

We know our marketing investments are generating returns. According to a 2024-25 Marketing return on investment (ROI) study done by Tourism Economics, our overall marketing efforts generated $17 in visitor spending for every dollar spent. When it comes to our leisure campaigns, that amount is much higher. A new Marketing ROI study for 2025-26 is in the works with detailed results expected in the late summer.