Destination Marketing

September-October 2025

For the fall months of September and October, our marketing efforts delivered strong visibility across multiple channels and campaigns, totaling 3.9B Impressions across all campaigns and tactics.  

Digital advertising generated more than 30.8M Impressions, while television campaigns reached an impressive 3.7B Impressions across more than 434K Spots. Out-of-home advertising also played a key role, delivering 174M Impressions across priority markets. On the meetings side, targeted campaigns drove more than 4.8M Impressions, reinforcing Greater Palm Springs as a premier destination for groups and events. 

In September, we successfully relaunched our Escape Your Ordinary brand campaign, which will run until April 2026. In addition, we continued promoting our Spa Month campaign, which launched in August and continued through the end of September. 

Target markets included:

• Year-round drive - Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Francisco
• Seasonal fly, one-stop, and Canadian - Seattle, Portland, Chicago, Kansas City, Charlotte, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, New York, Dallas, Denver, Austin, Washington DC, Oakland, San Jose, Salt Lake City, Omaha, St. Louis, Vancouver, Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Calgary

SPA MONTH 

Our inaugural Spa Month campaign launched on August 1 and continued through September 30, targeting local Coachella Valley residents as well as the Los Angeles and San Diego Markets. The overall campaign generated over 4M Impressions and 266K Clicks across dedicated landing pages, display, native, audio, and video via media partners such as SpaFinder, Spotify, Palm Springs Life, Cadent, and Locale. 

Signature Events

As we enter an exciting time of year, "event season," Visit Greater Palm Springs is focused on marketing support for our signature events to maximize awareness and drive visitation. This includes a coordinated mix of website placements, event calendar listings, public relations amplification, social media promotion, and partner collaboration across our owned channels.

Additionally, Visit Greater Palm Springs continues to provide in-kind digital billboard placements in key drive markets such as Los Angeles and San Diego—delivering millions of impressions. Event support for September and October is showcased in the billboard section below, along with a selection of recent creative examples that highlight the vibrant event experiences only available in Greater Palm Springs.

Our focus: keeping signature events front-and-center for travelers looking for unforgettable travel experiences.

Arrivalist

Visit Greater Palm Springs uses Arrivalist, a leading data platform, to understand visitor behavior and measure visitation to our destination and the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns. We have seen consistent above-benchmark results in lift attributed to our advertising campaigns.

September and October both reported above industry benchmarks with arrival lift* of  75.4% and 44.7% respectively. The most recent November report detailed a 69.5% arrival lift (above the 24% benchmark) and a 45.7% stay lift (well above the 9-10% benchmark). 

We look forward to continuing to monitor Arrivalist data throughout the year and will provide year-end wrap-up results in the January board report.

*Arrival lift attributes 69.5% more arrivals from those exposed to ads versus unexposed.

Looking Ahead

Work is well underway for the year ahead as we review 2025 results, evaluate industry shifts, and align on the metrics that will guide our measurable objectives for 2026. Over the past several months, the Marketing team—working closely with our agency partners—has developed a comprehensive strategic plan for the second half of our fiscal year and the 2026 calendar year. This plan leverages insights from our data partners, vendor performance, and broader industry trends to establish new quantitative and qualitative goals focused on increasing awareness, strengthening ROI, driving website traffic and engagement, and optimizing performance across all channels.

As part of this work, we’ve also created an integrated production roadmap to ensure we have the assets needed to support our campaigns across platforms. Our new digital series Escapes—highlighting the destination pillars of health and wellness, culinary experiences, outdoor adventures, and arts and culture—will launch in December with six episodes distributed across digital, social, and streaming channels throughout Q1. In addition, we are planning a new social media series for production in Q1, spotlighting unique and off-the-beaten-path experiences that will support both the Visit GPS and dineGPS channels. Additional productions are also in development to expand content for dining, spas, vacation rentals, and meetings throughout the coming year.

New Summer Campaign Development

Planning is also underway for the Summer 2026 season, taking a proactive approach to strengthening performance during our off-peak period. In November, we released an RFP to a select group of qualified agencies and production companies to develop a new summer brand campaign, including television spots, digital creative, and a robust summer social media campaign with the goal of delivering a cohesive message across all channels, driving increased awareness and visitation during the summer months.

Our refreshed summer brand campaign will introduce updated messaging brought to life through refreshed photography and video assets that showcase the unique value of a summer getaway in our oasis. Production is slated for Spring 2026, aligning with our summer partner co-op television program to ensure a unified message, maximizing exposure in our traditional drive markets as well as the expanded nonstop fly markets. These efforts position our destination to expand awareness and increase demand for summer travel to our destination.