This Could Be Your Destination.

Every destination marketing organization I talk to has some version of the same question: we know LGBTQ+ travelers matter — so what actually works?

It’s a fair question, and most of the answers out there are either a strategy deck or a national campaign with a budget few DMOs will ever see. So here’s something more useful: one real month of one real destination’s LGBTQ+ advertising, with the results broken down by ad.

The destination is Palm Springs. But as you read it, swap in your own. Your resorts, your neighborhoods, your Pride weekend, your signature event. Almost nothing that worked here depends on being in the desert.

The Destination

Palm Springs is about as clear-cut an LGBTQ+ destination as exists in America. It seated the country’s first all-LGBTQ+ city council in 2017, scores a perfect 100 on HRC’s Municipal Equality Index, and is home to a local LGBTQ+ media scene we mapped in our LGBTQ+ Palm Springs Regional Guide. In September, Visit Greater Palm Springs became the first California organization to reach Gold-level partnership with IGLTA, the International LGBTQ+ Travel Association.

And this November, Greater Palm Springs Pride celebrates its 40th year, November 6–8, under the theme “Be Included.” Organizers say Pride Week draws more than 200,000 people.

Which is exactly why this is a useful case study. You might assume a destination like Palm Springs doesn’t need to work at reaching LGBTQ+ travelers. It does — every month. Reputation gets you considered. Advertising gets you booked.

The Campaign

Our work for Visit Palm Springs runs on Facebook and Instagram, reaching LGBTQ+ travelers through a rotating set of creatives that point to Visit Palm Springs content. In October, eight ads were in rotation:

• Gay Resorts Guide — a short video on LGBTQ+ resorts in Palm Springs
• Pride 2026, plus a new Pride video and a new Pride image — all promoting the 40th anniversary weekend
• 3 Day LGBTQ Getaway — a ready-made itinerary
• Arenas District Guide — the city’s LGBTQ+ neighborhood
• Modernism Week and Halloween — seasonal and event content

The big change from September was video. New video creatives went into rotation for both the Gay Resorts Guide and Pride.

The Gay Resorts Guide video — October’s top performer — across Facebook and Instagram placements.

October vs. September

Metric	September	October	Change
Impressions	58,454	68,306	+16.9%
Reach	37,959	44,436	+17.1%
Post engagements	5,334	9,398	+76.2%
Link clicks	2,985	4,402	+47.5%
Landing page views	2,705	3,953	+46.1%
Landing page view rate	4.63%	5.79%	+25.1%
Link click-through rate	5.11%	6.44%	+1.3 pts
Cost per link click	~$0.48	~$0.37	−24.5%
Cost per landing page view	$0.54	$0.41	−23.9%

Impressions rose about 17%. Landing page views rose 46%. Engagement rose 76%. When results grow that much faster than delivery, it isn’t the budget doing the work — it’s the creative.

Ad by Ad

Here’s October broken down by creative. The landing page view rate in this report is landing page views divided by impressions — the share of everyone who saw the ad who ended up on Visit Palm Springs content.

Two ads did almost all of the work. The Gay Resorts Guide produced 1,910 landing page views — 48% of the campaign — and the three Pride creatives together produced 1,902, another 48%. Everything else combined accounted for the remaining 4%.

Here’s what that adds up to, as five strategies you could run for your own destination next month.

Strategy 1: Lead With Something Useful

The single best ad in the campaign wasn’t about an event, a skyline or a slogan. It was a guide to LGBTQ+ resorts. Nineteen seconds of video, a rainbow flag over a pool deck, and a promise: here’s where to stay.

It delivered a 14.57% landing page view rate — two and a half times the campaign average — at $0.24 per visit and about 21 cents a click. Its link click-through rate was 16.5%. And it generated 5,081 post engagements, more than half of the month’s total.

This isn’t a one-month fluke. In September, the top performer was also a guide — a Summer Fun Guide that drove 2,284 landing page views. LGBTQ+ travelers are planners. They want to know where they’ll be welcome, where to stay and what to do. Content that answers those questions gets clicked, because it’s the content they were going to search for anyway.

Strategy 2: Make Video the Default

October gave us an unusually clear look at video versus a still image, because both were promoting the same event in the same month.

The new Pride 2026 video: “Palm Springs Pride Turns 40!”

The video turned viewers into visitors at more than three times the rate of the image, at about a third less per visit. Engagement wasn’t close. And between them, the Gay Resorts Guide video and the Pride video produced nearly three-quarters of all October engagement.

One honest caveat: the two ads didn’t get identical delivery, so this isn’t a controlled test. But when the same pattern shows up on two different videos in the same month, it’s a signal worth acting on. Video doesn’t need to be elaborate, either. Short, simple clips of real places — a flag over a pool, a Ferris wheel lit up for Pride — did the job here.

Strategy 3: Wrap Your Anchor Event

Pride’s 40th anniversary is the biggest LGBTQ+ moment on the Palm Springs calendar, and the campaign treated it that way. Not one Pride ad, but three — each with a different job.

Together, those three ads produced 1,902 landing page views. Whatever your destination’s anchor event is — Pride, a festival, a circuit party, a film festival — it deserves the same treatment: start early, run more than one creative, and move the budget to whatever is converting.

Strategy 4: Speak Through Trusted Voices

Look closely at the ads and you’ll notice they don’t run from a tourism board’s brand page alone. They appear through community-run LGBTQ+ pages, including I Love Gay Palm Springs, alongside Visit Palm Springs’ own content.

That matters more than it used to. Since Meta removed sensitive-interest targeting in 2022, you can’t simply select an LGBTQ+ audience — something we’ve written about in The Targeting Is Gone. The Audience Isn’t. What you can do is show up through voices that LGBTQ+ travelers already follow and trust. The same principle is behind the local radio and digital pairing in our Purple Room case study, also in Palm Springs.

Strategy 5: Measure Visits, Then Plan the Calendar

Every number in this post that matters is a landing page view: someone who saw the ad, clicked it and waited for the destination’s page to load. Impressions tell you how loud you were. Landing page views tell you how many people started planning a trip.

Reading the report that way makes next month’s decisions straightforward. For November, the Gay Resorts Guide stays in rotation. Pride gets eight days of support with the strongest creatives, before a planned pause. The 3-day getaway and the Arenas District guide get featured. And the smallest spots — Halloween ran just 95 impressions — are treated as what they are: too small to draw conclusions from.

Your Destination, Swapped In

If you run marketing for a destination, here’s the same playbook with Palm Springs taken out:

The Takeaway

October’s rebound didn’t come from spending more. Impressions grew 17%; landing page views grew 46%, and each one cost 24% less. The difference was content LGBTQ+ travelers actually wanted — a resort guide and a Pride anniversary — told in video, through voices they trust, and measured by whether people showed up on the destination’s pages.

Palm Springs has a head start most destinations don’t. But none of these five strategies needs one. A guide, an event, a phone camera, the right local partners and an honest monthly report. That’s a campaign almost any destination could be running by next month.

Our 2026 LGBTQ+ Travel Market Guide covers the national picture behind campaigns like this one, and Every DMO Now Has an LGBTQ+ Travel Strategy. Almost None Have an LGBTQ+ Travel Audience. looks at why so many destination plans stall between the strategy deck and the feed.

Read the LGBTQ+ Palm Springs Regional Guide →