Visit Austria: 10,000+ conversations from an interactive winter campaign

Visit Austria is the official tourism marketing organisation for Austria. Tanja Ferner, the Marketing Manager, came to us at the planning stage for the brand's winter 2025-26 campaign. Tourism boards face a specific challenge that consumer brands don't: their job is to drive intent to visit a place, not to sell a product. Measuring success means measuring inspiration, consideration, and trip planning — all upper-funnel activities that traditional ad metrics capture poorly.

Tanja's brief was creative as much as it was strategic: can we build something that makes the audience feel Austria, not just see Austria? Something interactive enough that it earns its time?

We built a standalone interactive Austria-themed conversation experience — accessible from Instagram, Messenger, and the campaign's owned channels — that let prospective visitors design their own Austrian winter trip via a guided chat. The bot played the role of a friendly local expert, asking about travel style, group composition, interests (skiing, culture, food, wellness), and budget. At the end, prospects received a personalised itinerary, regional guides, and a follow-up offer for in-depth planning.

The experience worked because it traded a few minutes of the prospect's time for genuine personalisation. Most tourism marketing is one-to-many: this was one-to-one at scale — generating over 10,000 individual conversations across the campaign window.

Personality before pitch

The bot opened with regional Austrian language touches, photography from the campaign creative, and a tone that felt like talking to someone who lives there. Generic-bot energy gets dismissed in seconds; this didn't.

Branching narrative, not a quiz

The conversation branched based on responses — adventure-skiers got different content than wellness-spa travellers. Eight major narrative branches with regional content modules that combined into hundreds of possible itinerary outputs.

Tangible takeaway

Every completed conversation produced a downloadable personalised itinerary PDF, a curated regional guide, and a calendar reminder for typical booking windows. The deliverable felt earned, which made the email capture feel fair.

The build was a 14-day intensive ahead of the winter campaign launch. We worked alongside Visit Austria's creative agency, who handled the photography and copy direction; we handled the conversational architecture and the technical build.

The Visit Austria pattern applies to any organisation marketing experiences rather than products — tourism boards, museums, festivals, theme parks, retreat centres, immersive entertainment. The shared feature is that the "purchase decision" is high-consideration and emotional, and the brand benefits from helping the prospect imagine themselves into the experience.

The pattern is also valuable for brand-building campaigns where the conversion isn't immediate — book launches, film releases, gallery openings, charity awareness campaigns. The conversation does the work of building consideration and capturing first-party data without demanding an immediate transaction.

Generating 10,000+ conversations is significant because each one represents a genuine two-way interaction — not an ad impression or a page view, but a person who actively engaged, answered questions, and received something personalised. At scale, that's a first-party data asset the brand owns.