Lithuania used Midjourney to make tourism ads offering surreal visions of what to expect there

You’d think tourism marketers would stick to the facts when it comes to presenting everything a country has to offer. But Lithuania has gone full AI in its new campaign—which presents fantastical landscapes and other Dalí-esque imagery to entice interest from foreigners.

Lithuania Travel fed hundreds of images of Lithuania into Midjourney, the generative AI software, and asked it to spit out tourism ads. The results are intriguing, if very different for the category. The work is more evocative of what a visit to Lithuania might feel like (in a fever dream, perhaps) than what you’ll actually see, although landmarks such as St. Anne’s Church in Vilnius—and the traditional Lithuania dish cold pink soup—do make cameos.

The tagline is, “Lithuania. An experience to share.”

In press materials, Lithuania Travel said the images represent “a true amalgamation of all possible depictions of Lithuania.”

Dovilė Seliukė, head of tourism marketing and communications, said Lithuania is inviting travelers to “co-create their own experiences together with us, just like we co-created these surreal images with an AI helper. We want to show that Lithuania is an experience in and of itself—inspirational, beautiful, exciting and tasty, depending on what you’re looking for. For some, this experience will be a hot-air balloon flight, for some a street art tour, and for others a fine dining tasting of local flavors.” 

The campaign will run in Germany, Poland, the U.K. and Israel, which accounted for 32% of all tourism arrivals last year. The work will run in OOG in 11 cities, including London and Tel Aviv, and in digital and social.

In 2022, twice as many international tourists visited Lithuania as the year before—some 1.15 million made at least one overnight stay. Some 93% who visited last summer rated their overall impression of the country as positive.

In other AI tourism news, VisitBritain launched a campaign, “Fake (Br)it Till You Make It,” highlighting the richness of the U.K.’s cultures and cities through an online game that uses AI technology to score player’s attempts at imitating different regional British accents.