Regenerative Destination Marketing: Lessons from the ICCA Best Marketing Award 2025
Regenerative destination marketing defined the 2025 ICCA Best Marketing Award. What DMOs can learn from winner, Faroe Islands?
16604 ViewsRegenerative destination marketing is shaping the destination storytelling landscape, signaling a shift that visionary DMOs have long supported: communications that regenerate place, culture, and nature, rather than simply promoting them.
In addition to finalists, Business Events Sydney(BESydney) and Wonderful Copenhagen, the 2025 ICCA Best Marketing Award celebrates Visit Faroe Islands as the year’s winner (and all 3 are 2025 GDS-Index participants). Its much-loved, strongly-supported, participatory campaign demonstrates how destinations can communicate value, identity, community, and shared responsibility with integrity and authenticity.
What Made This Year’s Winner Stand Out?
Visit Faroe Islands inspires with a campaign with the catchy title of “Closed for Maintenance” that blends emotional clarity, collaboration, and creativity. The project invited participants to be part of an exclusive, hands-on and unique experience of helping to maintain the hiking trails that visitors and locals love to use.
It gave its voluntourists an exclusive insight, as the trails were not open to the public during their trip, and rewarded them with camaraderie, connection, and a sense of “leaving a place better” than they found it.
Rather than selling an experience, the team elevated a purpose: protecting a fragile destination while empowering visitors to be part of its long-term resilience. The participatory aspect is a powerful one that inspired our own changemakers, Milda Salciute, who supplied the photographs in this post, to take part.
“Dr. Senthil Gopinath, ICCA CEO, congratulated the winner and finalists, saying: “The Best Marketing Award is one of ICCA’s most anticipated traditions, and this year’s finalists have raised the bar once again. Each campaign reflects the creativity, resilience, and strategic thinking that define our industry. Congratulations to Visit Faroe Islands for an exceptional achievement that will inspire marketing professionals worldwide.”
Why This Award Matters to DMOs and CVBs
The ICCA Best Marketing Award is more than recognition. It is a compass for the future of business events and tourism communications. It shows that global audiences respond to campaigns that:
- Focus on people and place*
- Acknowledge environmental pressures and communicate efforts/progress*
- Celebrate community strength*
- Move beyond consumption to participation and regeneration*
- Offer real, measurable impact*
This approach echoes what we see across many regenerative destination marketing leaders, including those highlighted in the 2025 insights from the GDS-Index, “Shifting Tides”, which you can download from this button:
(See advances in climate communications, especially, on page 16 and the top 3 cities’ communications’ full-marks on page 28).
Lessons From The Winning Campaign
Here are a few effective strategic communications approaches to consider:
These are themes GDS-Movement regularly encourages when supporting clients and engaging with project partners.
Get More Good Ideas From the Other Finalists
Both Wonderful Copenhagen and BESydney are long term GDS-Index participants, committed to better managing what they measure. They were chosen as finalists along with Visit Faroe Islands, and their qualifying projects are worth exploring. Here, they explain it in their own words:
How Do This Year’s Award Results Connect With Regeneration?
It underlines the idea that regeneration isn’t merely a trend, it is a mindset shift that asks destinations to create net-positive outcomes for nature and communities. Visit Faroe Islands demonstrates how marketing can be part of this shift, reinforcing values and reflecting positive change.
Marketing Regeneration is Becoming Mainstream
The ICCA Best Marketing Award 2025 reminds us that regenerative destination marketing is rapidly becoming the new norm amongst leading cities and regions. Destinations that weave community perspectives, environmental stewardship, and bold creativity into their storytelling not only win awards, they build trust, loyalty, and ensure the business of tourism and events means lasting positive impact for all. For efforts like that, every participant deserves a trophy.
* Do you know what else global audiences respond to? A destination’s credible sustainability performance, which GDS-Index measures annually.
The GDS-Index is a trusted performance improvement programme to assess and accelerate the progress of a destination’s regenerative journey. It measures, benchmarks, and enhances the sustainability strategies, action plans, and initiatives of approximately 100 destination management organisations, municipal authorities, and their tourism supply chains.
Co-founded in 2016 by the International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA), City Destinations Alliance (CityDNA), IMEX Group, and MCI, the GDS-Index offers an unparalleled resource for visitors, DMOs, municipalities, and event planners looking for destinations that offer vetted and verified sustainability performance.
Try these related stories:
- Faroe Islands’ sustainability benchmarking results for 2025
- Sydney’s sustainability benchmarking results for 2025
- Copenhagen’s sustainability benchmarking results for 2025
- Everything you need to know about the EU Sustainability Messaging and Reporting Regulations (FAQs)
- How to tell a true destination sustainability story without greenwashing or green hushing
- Crisis is coming. Are you prepared?
