Instagram goes longer, Starbucks gives shoppers dates to anticipate, and experience gifts gain ground. Here’s what travel marketers can take from each.

Someone sees a video of your destination’s summer concert series and starts picturing a weekend away. They click through, looking for dates, nearby hotels and a sense of how the evening fits into a trip.

Someone two hours from your destination might recognize your waterfront and have a few of your restaurants saved on Instagram. They’d love to visit. But they haven’t made a plan.

This week on Travel Signals, Disney is building around a creator’s established appeal. Google is making sources more visible inside AI answers. And Apple Maps is helping visitors find their way through one of Austin’s biggest weekends.

Several Advance Travel & Tourism clients earned recognition at the Mississippi Tourism Association’s 2026 Tourism Awards Program, with honors spanning destination leadership, research, partnership and industry service.

This week, brands are borrowing from nightlife to earn a place in people’s calendars. Facebook and Instagram are testing feeds that put video first. And consumers are continuing to spend despite their frustration with the economy.

A recent honeymoon in Greece gave Marketing Manager Sara Dyer a firsthand look at a familiar tension in destination marketing: the push to discover somewhere different, even when the iconic experience is exactly what a traveler wants.

Travel Signals: Search Gets Competitive, Disruption Becomes Content and Gen Z Goes Offline Travel marketing is becoming more digital at the exact moment travelers are craving something more real. This week, TikTok put a price tag on the top of its search results. A communications failure disrupted thousands of flights across the Northeast. And new research suggests Gen Z is increasingly [...]

An economic impact report should be more than an annual announcement. It can become a year-round source of stories that shows residents, elected officials and industry partners how tourism moves through a community.