Each month the Scattered Clouds blog takes a look at the wonderful world of tourism through a data and evidence-led lens, all in pursuit of transforming tourism sector data into insight of course!
Awareness - March 2026
Those involved in marketing will sometimes refer to a funnel, the end point of which is someone making a purchase. Marketers, as with so many other tribes that very definitely includes travel and tourism professionals, love an acronym, and in this regard AIDA is sometimes used to describe the stages of this fabled funnel. It all starts with Awareness, with the aim of this evolving into Interest that leads to Desire and eventually Action.
A few things that have crossed my mind of late led me to decide to devote this particular blog to the Awareness stage, although inevitably we’ll touch on later stages too.
Raise your hand if at some point over the past couple of months you have thought to yourself “Oh, that’s what the flag of Greenland looks like”. Certainly this is one of the thoughts that prompted me to focus on the importance of awareness when it comes to the choices we make about places to visit.
Few if any will decide on where to travel based on their view of that nation’s flag, and risking the wrath of marketers the same perhaps holds true in terms of a logo. However, my broader point is that most people who take even the slightest interest in current affairs will have recently discovered things about Greenland that they probably didn’t previously know.
A tourist board would have to spend a fortune to generate as much coverage of their destination as Greenland has seen since the start of 2026, and the barrenness of the landscape and distinctive cultural traditions of its people will doubtless have seen some leap rapidly from Awareness to Interest in the destination.
Many hurdles can inhibit progress from Interest and Desire to Action, but one potential such hurdle that has recently been dismantled is the opening of an extended runway at Nuuk International Airport making it possible for larger aircraft to land, which in turn creates scope for route development.
Being prominent in current affairs may boost Awareness and Interest, but a sad example of how this may, at least in the short-term, not translate into Desire would be Ukraine. However, if Ukraine is ultimately free of conflict and able to choose its own destiny then I reckon there will be plenty of travellers who would willingly go and explore Kiev and other cities, with tourism being a potential source of revenue to help fund reconstruction.
It doesn’t have to be popping up in geopolitics that drives destination awareness of course, it is well known that literary, film and television all have the ability to shift someone’s understanding of a place. Examples abound including Glenfinnan Viaduct, transformed from being known solely among railway enthusiasts to an icon of the Harry Potter movies, West Bay in Dorset masquerading as Broadchurch, and windswept Yorkshire Moors starring role in adaptations of Wuthering Heights.
The lesson is that these build awareness and if that is to see progress through (or is it down?) the funnel then it’ll be what the person has seen on a screen that they wish to gawp at with their own eyes. Going back several decades Jersey definitely benefited from Bergerac, but it’s important to recognise this was the early 1980s and low cost airlines weren’t vying for travellers’ attention and the number of tv channels available to watch was about to jump from three to four – different times!
Sticking with the Channel Islands, marketers in Guernsey got excited about the release of the film “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society”, however the outdoor locations used in the movie portrayed not Guernsey but the beauties of North Devon, and its what the viewer saw on screen that they wish to see in reality, not something that bears little resemblance.
Earlier I said that a logo doesn’t offer some magical power that inevitably creates awareness, but there is an argument to say that the strapline juxtaposed eith a logo might help nudge someone from the Awareness stage to the Interest stage of the funnel. This can be done by conveying a narrative, for example that India is “Incredible” or that New Zealand is “Pure”, but on the premise that this is making a promise, it’s vital that the bulk of those who end up visiting won’t feel they have been sold a lie.
Awareness of a place in the public’s attention may not always come courtesy of global events or having featured in literature or movies, the humdrum reporting of stuff that’s going on can inadvertently lead to somewhere getting mentioned more than is the norm, for example the sequence of sun-free days in Aberdeen during January and February was widely reported in the media. As it’s not your archetypal sun and beach destination, even though it does have a splendid beach, there’s a potential awareness upside to the column inches and news footage created thanks to this meteorological event, although leveraging that opportunity perhaps requires plenty of creativity and whimsy.
Awareness may grow thanks to concerted marketing campaigns or entirely unexpected happenings, but it’s unquestionably key to starting someone on a journey that may ultimately lead them to experience a destination firsthand.