As the first stage in its global recovery campaign, Switzerland Tourism ST carried out the empathy-driven “Dream now – travel later.” (DNTL) campaign shortly after most markets had introduced strict lockdowns to contain the pandemic, with restrictions on people’s professional and private lives. This was a great success, as the results show (see video): there were nearly 17 million organic impressions on the digital channels. More than 320,000 people liked, shared or commented on the DNTL social media posts, for example on Facebook.

The DNTL claim devised by ST was not only used widely by its official regional and corporate partners, but also, happily, found many imitators among other tourism service suppliers. The #DreamNowTravelLater hashtag was used one hundred thousand times. This illustrates how well the empathetic tone of the campaign was received in the tourism industry, and how successfully ST, as the national tourism marketing organisation, was able to perform its role of standard-bearer.