How to Advertise Hospitality and Tourism Brands on Pinterest 

96% of Pinterest Searches Are Unbranded — and That's the Opportunity

Here is a number that changes how you should think about Pinterest advertising for travel: 96% of top searches on the platform contain no brand name whatsoever.

People are not searching for your hotel, your ski resort, or your destination. They are searching for "highland aesthetic," "adventure tourism ideas," or "spring destination Europe." 

Pinterest's own Predicts 2026 report — compiled from 600 million monthly active user searches — shows travel searches moving in two clear directions: adventure-focused "Darecations" (searches for adventure tourism up 75%, auto racing events up 85%) and atmospheric, remote destinations like the Scottish Highlands (searches for "scotland highlands aesthetic" up 465%). Both directions are search-intent driven. Both represent traveler decisions forming weeks or months before booking.

For hospitality and tourism marketers, this is a structural advantage. The question is whether you are set up to reach people at that specific moment — or whether you are running ads that show up too late, in the wrong context, with the wrong signal.

Travel Intent Forms Early, But Most Ads Target Too Late

Travel decisions are among the longest purchase cycles in consumer behavior. Research from Amra and Elma LLC found that 8 out of 10 travelers use their phones to book trips — but the inspiration phase starts well before any booking engine interaction. By the end of 2023, international tourist arrivals had recovered to 88% of pre-pandemic levels, and nights spent in Q1 2024 exceeded the equivalent period in 2019. Demand is back. But competition for that traveler's attention earlier in the funnel — during inspiration and consideration — has increased at the same rate.

Pinterest is structurally positioned at that inspiration stage. It operates more like a visual search engine than a social platform. A user saving pins about alpine landscapes in February is building a travel plan, not scrolling passively. They are signaling destination intent, format preference (immersive, scenic, outdoor), and timing — all before they open a booking site.

Most tourism advertisers are not capturing this. Travel industry digital ad spending grew 132% to $344 million in 2023 and continues to climb. But the majority of that budget flows into Google Search (high intent, high cost, short window) or Meta (broad awareness, high competition, declining organic reach). Pinterest sits between those two stages — reach at the intent-formation phase — and it remains underdeveloped in most tourism advertising mixes.

Why Generic Interest Targeting Fails on Pinterest

The standard approach on Pinterest is to run promoted pins targeted at "travel" or "outdoor adventure" interest categories. This works at a basic level. But it misses what makes the platform valuable.

When 96% of searches are unbranded and discovery-first, the user is in a genuinely open state. They have not made a decision. Your ad does not need to interrupt — it needs to match the visual and contextual moment they are in. An alpine skiing video that appears inside a board about "winter sport destinations" lands differently than the same video shown to anyone tagged as "travel enthusiast."

Generic interest targeting flattens this. It reaches people who have previously shown travel interest, but it does not differentiate between someone researching budget city breaks and someone deep in a planning session about ski resorts in Austria. The result is wasted impressions on audiences who are not in the right mental frame — and missed impressions on those who are.

Adello's PXLSTRM campaign data illustrates this gap. In YouTube contextual targeting, standard placement (TrueView) reached relevant impressions 45% of the time. PXLSTRM's contextual video targeting reached 98% relevant impressions — a 118% improvement — while simultaneously reducing eCPM by approximately 29%. The mechanism: analyzing the actual content context of the video environment, not just audience demographics or declared interests.

The same gap between context-matched and interest-matched targeting exists on Pinterest. And the opportunity to close it is now accessible.

6 Approaches to Advertising Hospitality and Tourism on Pinterest

1. Pinterest Video Pins and Idea Pins for Destination Storytelling

Pinterest users respond to content that shows a place. Standard static pins still work for product-style visuals (hotel room, dish, slope view). But for travel specifically, video formats — Video Pins and multi-frame Idea Pins — produce measurably higher engagement because they communicate atmosphere and scale.

Practically, this means:

• Video Pins (6–15 seconds) work best for destination reveal moments: aerial approaches, landscape transitions, seasonal moments. No dialogue required. Captions should include destination-specific terms that Pinterest's algorithm will index.
• Idea Pins (multi-page, persistent format) are suited for itinerary-style content: Day 1 in the Dolomites, three-day ski itinerary, spring hiking guide. These remain discoverable for months after posting.
• Both formats benefit from high-resolution, color-accurate production. Pinterest's user base skews toward planners who curate carefully — low-quality visuals are filtered out in the discovery algorithm.

Operational note: Pinterest's video ads do not autoplay with audio in the feed. Visual communication must carry the message without relying on sound.

2. Pinterest SEO: Keywords Drive Discoverability Before Ads Do

Pinterest functions as a search engine. Board names, pin titles, and descriptions are all indexed. For paid campaigns, the keyword strategy that you would apply to a Google Search campaign applies here — but with visual intent context.

High-value keywords for alpine and hospitality destinations currently include location + activity combinations ("austria ski resort 2026," "south tyrol spring hiking"), aesthetic descriptors ("highland aesthetic," "mountain lodge interior"), and experiential phrases tied to Pinterest's 2026 trend data ("adventure tourism europe," "remote destination travel").

Organic keyword optimization compounds the value of paid placements. A destination board that has built consistent search authority over six months will receive algorithmic preference — organic saves and engagement reduce the effective cost of promoted pins targeting the same audience.

Build the organic content layer first, then allocate ad budget to amplify what is already performing.

3. Pinterest Top of Search Ads for High-Intent Destination Queries

Pinterest launched Top of Search ads in September 2025. During testing, these placements produced 29% higher click-through rates than standard in-feed placements. The mechanism is direct: when a user searches "ski resort austria" or "alpine holiday spring," a Top of Search ad appears before organic results.

This is the closest equivalent to Google Search advertising on Pinterest — placement is triggered by a specific query, not an interest profile. For tourism brands with defined geographic targets, this format justifies higher CPM because the search signal is explicit and narrow.

Qualification logic for this format:

• Destination is specific enough to define search terms (not "travel" but "skiing dolomites")
• Budget allows for CPM at a competition-driven rate in the relevant market
• Landing page matches the destination and format of the pin (mismatch kills conversion rate)

4. Audience Segmentation Using Life Events and Behavioral Signals

Pinterest's audience targeting includes a life events category that is particularly relevant to travel: "planning a trip," "newly engaged" (honeymoon intent), "planning a move" (relocation tourism), seasonal peaks. These are declared intent signals, not inferred interests.

Layering life events onto geographic targeting allows meaningful segmentation without requiring large creative budgets:

For DACH-market tourism brands, combining geo-targeting (AT, DE, CH) with life events reduces wasted impressions significantly compared to broad interest categories.

5. Contextual Video Targeting via PXLSTRM for Pinterest

Adello's PXLSTRM technology has recently expanded to Pinterest placements, adding to its existing YouTube presence. PXLSTRM operates differently from Pinterest's native targeting system. Rather than targeting users based on declared interests or demographic data, it analyzes the content environment — what type of content surrounds a given video placement — and matches ads to contextually relevant moments.

In practice for tourism and hospitality: a video ad for a ski resort in Schladming would appear within Pinterest video content contextually related to alpine landscapes, winter sports, outdoor adventure, or Austrian travel — not simply to anyone tagged as "travel interested." The distinction matters because Pinterest users in active planning sessions produce denser contextual signals than standard interest profiles can capture.

What this addresses operationally:

• Impression relevance rate increases from standard ~45% to 98% under contextual targeting (measured in analogous YouTube deployments)
• Brand safety: ads do not appear in unrelated content contexts
• Budget efficiency: lower eCPM on relevant impressions (~29% reduction observed in comparable campaigns)

For tourism brands running mobile programmatic video on Pinterest, PXLSTRM's contextual layer provides targeting precision that platform-native tools do not. The result is a higher proportion of impressions seen by users who are actively engaged with travel content — the segment most likely to save, click, and convert.

The 2026 Planning Window Is Already Open

The Pinterest Predicts 2026 report is based on search data from September 2023 through August 2025. The trends it identifies — adventure tourism, remote atmospheric destinations, experience-first travel — are not forecasts. They are already present in the platform's search behavior. The recommendation to act on them in 2026 means the planning window is already open.

Tourism brands that build Pinterest presence and audience authority in Q1 and Q2 2026 will compound against those who wait until peak season. Pinterest's algorithm rewards consistent, high-engagement content with increasing organic distribution over time. Paid campaigns launched before destination interest peaks will benefit from lower competition CPMs and established pin authority.

There is also a practical budget argument. The Social/YouTube/Pinterest ad cluster represents 19,080 monthly search volume in English, with Adello's current coverage rated as "Very Low" — meaning the competitive pressure on these placements has not yet reached the saturation of Google or Meta. Early-mover allocation while CPMs remain below their likely 2027 ceiling is a straightforward efficiency argument.

Specifically for DACH-market tourism brands: the "marketing für restaurants" and hospitality vertical keywords, where Adello is already ranking (position 21), signal an existing audience that responds to tourism content. Pinterest advertising, coordinated with a programmatic mobile DSP campaign, extends the same reach into the visual planning phase.

Pinterest is a structurally useful channel for tourism and hospitality advertising because it captures users at the formation stage of a travel decision — before destination loyalty is set, before booking intent narrows into price comparison. 

The platform rewards content that matches the user's current moment of exploration: contextually relevant video, destination-specific keywords, mobile-native format.

The travel sector's digital ad spending continues to grow. The question is where in the funnel the budget is deployed.

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