Tourism board drives tourists to under-visited spots with self-guided car trips /

Hope you like surprises / This campaign taps into the growing mystery vacation trend – a smart antidote to decision fatigue. Rather than navigating endless options, travellers are surrendering control to travel agencies who curate their journey, revealing destinations only at departure.

The trend responds to the desire for spontaneity amid travel’s digital oversaturation and the surge of travel content on social media, which funnels people to the same tourist hotspots. It offers the illusion of surprise in an era where it feels like we’ve seen it all before.

Speaking about the business objective for this campaign, Súsanna Sørensen. Visit Faroe Island’s marketing manager for leisure and PR, told Contagious, ‘The Faroe Islands are relatively unknown, so we are always looking at ways to raise awareness of our country, but for this particular initiative, we wanted to tap into the discussion about how algorithms and social media lead us all down the same one-lane street, where we end up in predictable experiences.’

This shift reveals that today’s travellers don’t just want to find new places, but new ways of experiencing them too. Visit Faroe Islands embraces this new outlook. As people grow tired of perfectly planned, Instagram-ready vacations, Visit Faroe Islands offers something more than a neatly packaged trip, but a chance for people to steer away from the norms. 

Travel brands like Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) offer mystery flight offers where the destination remains a mystery until the flight is underway, while deal website Wowcher has created travel deals where you can purchase a voucher for a holiday to an unknown destination. It’s also become a popular TikTok trend, with people filming the moment they find out the location they’ve been given.

Never too much / This is an interesting campaign given the context of the world’s current overtourism phenomenon – destinations like Venice and Barcelona continue to battle negative headlines about throngs of tourists and increasingly telling visitors they’re not welcome. The Faroe Islands have seen a surge in tourists over the last decade. In 2013, the islands’ hotels and guesthouses recorded 128,767 stays, and by 2023, the total had risen to 221,575, according to the Financial Times.

The Faroe Islands, which attracts more than 100,000 tourists to its 54,000-person population, flips what most destinations consider a crisis into a compelling marketing asset. The self-driving cars are eminently PR-able, not only getting media coverage for the idea but also giving the Faroe Islands the chance to humble brag about its popularity as a destination. The initiative is a sly flex that this is destination that has far more to offer than just a few key tourist hotspots, it’s a place to really explore.