Orlando’s 2025 Tourism PR Win: 45% Brazil Flight Jump

Getting the Brazil-to-Orlando air service back on track is a textbook case of effective tourism PR and sharp destination marketing. We kicked this campaign off in late 2024, running through 2025, with a clear goal: make Orlando the top choice for Brazilian travelers again after international travel had cratered. The strategy, which was all about direct flights and hitting the right cultural notes, paid off big time, though we definitely fumbled our channel spending at the start. Anyone in a region trying to get their international visitor numbers back up should be looking at this, because it offers some serious lessons. The real question is, can anyone just copy the playbook and expect the same results?

Campaign Genesis and Strategic Objectives

The drop-off in direct flights from Brazil to Orlando was a huge problem for Florida’s tourism economy. Before 2020, Brazil was always a top source of international visitors, with millions coming every year. The pandemic just wrecked those routes, and visitor numbers fell off a cliff. By early 2024, even with travel bouncing back globally, Brazilian flight capacity to Orlando was still stuck below 60% of what it used to be. That gap wasn’t a problem, it was a massive opportunity for a targeted tourism PR and destination marketing push.

Visit Orlando, working with airline partners like Azul Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras and LATAM Airlines, had one main goal: restore the direct flights and, in turn, get Brazilian visitor numbers up by 30% within 18 months. We also had secondary goals: get them to stay longer and spend more per trip. The price tag for this whole thing was $2.8 million spread over 12 months starting in October 2024. That number had to cover all our media buys, creative production, influencer contracts, and general PR work.

Creative Approach and Messaging

Our creative had to show Orlando as a complete family escape with unique cultural stuff, great food, and natural beauty, moving way beyond just the theme parks. We knew from experience that Brazilian families often travel as big multi-generational groups, and our visuals had to show that. Our first creative concepts missed the mark, leaning on the same old generic theme park shots. The data from our initial A/B tests on social media was brutal, showing a 20% lower click-through rate (CTR) on any ad that didn’t feature multiple generations or a mix of different activities. That kind of feedback forces a quick pivot.

So we shifted to showing real, authentic moments: a grandmother laughing with her grandchild on a calm ride, teenagers checking out the Kennedy Space Center, parents having a nice dinner in Winter Park, and families out on the water kayaking through the Everglades. The whole message was about the emotional connection of sharing an experience, with taglines like “Orlando: Sua Próxima Grande História de Família” (Orlando: Your Next Great Family Story). It turned out that video, especially short-form stuff on platforms like Instagram Reels and TikTok, absolutely crushed static images, pulling in 3x higher engagement rates. It was a clear sign that for this audience, you need dynamic stories, not just pretty pictures.

Targeting Strategy and Channel Allocation

We were surgical with our targeting, splitting the Brazilian market into three main personas: wealthy families in big cities (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte), young couples looking for some adventure, and people who had been to Orlando before. We used anonymized travel data from our airline partners and credit card transaction data to find people who were already likely to travel. Our geo-targeting zeroed in on specific neighborhoods where these people lived, and our interest-based targeting went after things like “family travel,” “theme parks,” “luxury resorts,” and “international shopping.”

The budget was heavily weighted toward digital. About 60% of the budget was for digital ads on Google, Meta (Facebook and Instagram), and YouTube. We used programmatic display through platforms like The Trade Desk to hit a wider audience on travel and lifestyle sites. A big chunk of what was left, about 25%, went to influencer marketing. We found Brazilian family travel bloggers and YouTubers who could give an authentic account of their trip. The last 15% we spent on traditional media like print ads in fancy travel magazines and a few TV spots.

Initial Performance Metrics (First 3 Months)

In the first three months (October to December 2024), we were just trying to build awareness and get people searching for flights. The early numbers looked decent:

• Impressions: 75 million across all digital channels.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR): Average 1.8% for digital ads.
• Cost Per Click (CPC): $0.35.
• Website Sessions: 1.2 million unique visitors to the campaign landing page.

But our initial Cost Per Lead (CPL) for flight inquiries was hovering around $15.00, which was higher than our $12.50 target. We were getting lots of eyeballs, but we weren’t closing efficiently. The problem, as it turned out, was a bad landing page experience. People were clicking ads and getting dumped on a generic tourism site instead of a page showing them flight deals, which added a stupid, unnecessary click to the process. We fixed this quickly.

Optimization and Mid-Campaign Adjustments

The only reason this campaign worked was because we were constantly tweaking it. That landing page problem is a perfect example. Once we started sending ad traffic straight to the airline booking pages with the Orlando flights already filtered, our CPL dropped to $11.80 in two weeks. That’s the kind of change that saves you hundreds of thousands of dollars over the life of a campaign. We also noticed that our influencer content showing off neighborhoods outside the theme park zone, like Celebration or Lake Nona, got a lot more engagement from repeat visitors. That discovery immediately led us to ask our influencers for more of that specific kind of content.

Another big change we made was to our bidding on Google Ads. We started with a target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) strategy, but we saw that certain keywords like “Orlando family vacation packages” and “direct flights to Orlando from São Paulo” were pure gold. We switched to a maximize conversions strategy and started manually bidding up those terms ourselves, a move that got us a 15% bump in conversion volume the very next quarter without spending a dime more.

We also fine-tuned our programmatic display ads. We stopped trying to reach everyone and focused on retargeting people who had already been to our campaign site or interacted with our social media. This shift gave us a 2.5x higher conversion rate from retargeted ads compared to our prospecting ads, proving it’s better to nurture someone who’s already interested than to constantly shout at new people.

Results and Key Learnings

By the end of the 12 months in September 2025, the results were hard to argue with. We saw a 45% increase in direct flight bookings from São Paulo, which blew our original 30% target out of the water. In real terms, that meant an estimated 180,000 additional Brazilian visitors came over during the campaign. The overall Cost Per Lead (CPL) landed at a very efficient $12.50, and the Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) hit 4.1x. For every dollar we spent on marketing, we generated $4.10 in direct revenue from flight bookings alone, and that’s not even counting all the money spent on hotels, food, and parks.

We counted over 220,000 conversions (a completed flight booking) over the whole campaign, which works out to a cost per conversion of around $12.72. That number includes every dollar we spent, so it’s a solid measure of our efficiency.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

The things that worked best were the obsessive tracking and fast changes. Our analytics team gave us weekly reports, which let us move quickly. The focus on authentic, family-focused creative really connected with the audience. But maybe the biggest lesson was just how important a frictionless path from the ad to the booking is. Any little bit of friction, even one extra click, absolutely kills performance.

What Didn’t Work as Expected

Of course, not everything went perfectly, and you have to be honest about that in any real campaign review. Our initial spending on traditional print ads, especially in broad-interest magazines, was pretty much a waste. It probably helped with brand awareness a little, but the ROAS was terrible compared to digital, we couldn’t track it well, and the cost per impression was way too high. We cut that spending by 30% halfway through and moved the money to digital video and influencers, where it worked much better.

Another thing that didn’t work at first was our broad geographic targeting in Brazil. São Paulo and Rio are obviously huge markets, but our early data showed that we were getting a much better return from specific wealthy districts within those cities, like Jardim América in São Paulo or Leblon in Rio. As soon as we tightened our geo-targeting to those micro-segments, our CPL in those areas improved by 10%. It’s a good reminder that with niche international markets, even big ones, precision is always better than just going for volume.

An eMarketer report on global digital ad spending backs this up, showing how digital channels are just eating marketing budgets, and our campaign’s results fit right into that trend. The report talks about data-driven optimization and personalized content being key, which were the two things that really drove our success with the Brazil-Orlando campaign.

The Brazil-Orlando air service campaign is what you get when you combine smart tourism PR with data-obsessed destination marketing. Its success was built on precise targeting, creative that actually resonated with Brazilian families, continuous optimization, and a relentless focus on the user’s path to purchase. Any team looking to do something similar needs to have their analytics dialed in and be ready to make fast decisions based on what the numbers are telling them.