A case study in partnership: Inspiring millennials to explore Canada.

In 2016, Destination Canada launched the Millennial Travel Program with Bell Media and 21 industry partners - a massive bilingual content campaign that would challenge Canadian millennials to explore Canada’s urban backstreets, communal hubs and rugged trails, and to create their own experiences along the way.

Taking a departure from marketing to our international markets, we created a domestic program aimed at inspiring Canadian millennials to travel their own country in the lead up to Canada 150 in 2017. The two-year program highlighted some of the best-kept secrets of Canada through inspiring videos, stories and influencers.

Why Millennials?

Millennial travel continues to emerge as one of the fastest growing segments of the global tourism sector. Millennials are high-spending, long and frequent travellers, likely to recommend a destination and likely to be a repeat visitor over their lifetimes. The unique characteristics and value of this segment were pivotal in driving the decision to develop a tourism marketing campaign specifically targeted at this group, first domestically and later to our international markets.

Key statistics

Key activities included the launch of Far & Wide and Infiniment Canada to act as content hubs for the program. We brought more than 150 uniquely Canadian experiences to life through short-form webisodes, editorial content and offers, and enlisted over 50 social influencers to share their real-time experiences.

Campaign goals and results

The results speak for themselves. In addition to the social media impact and a sizable 16% lift in travel, the program positively shifted travel perceptions—significantly more Canadian millennials now say that taking a vacation in Canada by car is easier than they had believed.

Reach beyond Canada

We applied an international extension to this program to inspire millennials in our key markets to choose Canada as their next vacation. The international component is ongoing, and while visitation results have been integrated with overall arrivals data, the international extension has generated:

• 300 million in reach
• 5 million video views
• 250,000 leads to partners and
• 30,000+ additional bookings to Canada.

Read the Millennial Travel Program 2017 Case Study for specifics on the content strategy, millennials as a target segment and domestic and international results.