Strong Results in a Complex Season: 2025 Spring–Summer Marketing Campaign Recap

The results are in for Travel Manitoba’s 2025 Spring–Summer marketing campaign, and despite a season that required tourism operators and our marketing campaigns to be agile, the overall performance demonstrates the strength of our strategy, partnerships and brand.

This past summer, Manitoba experienced a record wildfire season. Along with everyone, we needed to pause or adjust our marketing activity in affected regions and shift messaging to reflect where and when it was responsible to visit. These decisions were made with safety and respect for communities at the forefront.

Even with significant pauses to our campaign, our marketing delivered strong returns, reinforcing the value of strategic, data-informed marketing investment for Manitoba’s tourism economy.

The 2025 Spring–Summer campaign generated:

• Over $5.6 million in gross bookings
• 5,280 airline tickets
• Almost 110,000 qualified leads to business partners

All of this was achieved with a $1.175 million marketing spend, resulting in an estimated $4.76 return for every dollar invested. These results clearly demonstrate how targeted marketing activity contributes to growing Manitoba’s $1.89 billion-a-year tourism industry.

Working closely with Expedia, Adara, Lonely Planet, our airline and business partners, the Spring–Summer campaign generated tens of millions of impressions across key markets. TravelManitoba.com benefited from this momentum, with over 3 million website views during the campaign period.

One standout performer was our festivals and events page, which delivered an 11 per cent click-through rate for partners—an exceptional result that highlights the popularity of Manitoba’s exciting summer events and how successful our events listings page can be.

As always, quality content leads to engagement in our campaigns. We created and posted videos to YouTube, which collectively generated over 25,700 minutes of watch time. This high-level of engagement speaks to the quality of our team’s storytelling, production and how the experiences we share call to visitors’ hearts.

In addition to video content, we continued expanding our storytelling mix. Our brand-new podcast hosted by Virgin Radio host, Chrissy Troy, Been There, Never Done That, launched its first season during the Spring–Summer period and recorded over 2,000 downloads.

The campaign also included targeted sponsorships that delivered meaningful reach and engagement:

• Our Winnipeg Sea Bears contest generated nearly 4 million impressions
• Winnipeg Goldeyes bus wrap
• The Red River Co-op Road Trips contest resulted in over 8,600 contest entries and 105,000 impressions

We also piloted several new initiatives during the Spring–Summer campaign, including Carvertise and Truckside advertising, which saw Travel Manitoba branded digital and display ads on vehicles around the Toronto International Film Festival and other high-profile areas. These exciting pilots allowed us to test new advertising formats in key markets at affordable rates while gathering insights to inform future campaigns.

GuideGeek, our AI travel assistant, answered over 15,000 messages and engaged with more than 7,000 interested visitors during our leisure campaign. This tool continues to enhance the visitor journey by providing real-time, accessible travel information and supporting trip planning at any time, day or night. Leaning into our AI travel assistant to help share the latest information about Manitoba attractions, operators and events has helped us meet visitors where they are and keep up with technology trends.

Overall, the 2025 Spring–Summer campaign proved that even in a season marked by complexity and uncertainty, strategic marketing, strong partnerships and compelling content can still deliver results.

The campaign reinforced the importance of flexibility, responsible destination marketing and ongoing innovation—principles that will continue to guide our efforts as we promote Manitoba to visitors near and far.

Thank you to our industry partners and visitors for your collaboration, adaptability and commitment throughout the season. Together, we continue to strengthen Manitoba’s $1.89 billion tourism economy and ensure visitors experience the very best our province has to offer.

This article was crafted with AI support.