Texas Tourism: Travel Texas and the State's Destination Brand

Edited on Jun 23, 2026.

Texas operates one of the most distinctive destination brands in the world. "Texas. It's like a whole other country" — the tourism slogan the state has run for three decades — captures an identity proposition no other U.S. state has matched at the same brand scale.

On July 10, 2015, the Governor's Office of the State of Texas requested bids for a two-year contract to handle the state's tourism marketing. Applicants were asked to submit references, case studies, and the broader work product that demonstrates the agency's ability to operate a state-tourism program at scale.

This is the working reference on Travel Texas, the state's destination footprint, and what makes Texas tourism marketing distinctive.

The destination footprint

The Texas tourism economy runs across:

• Austin — the state capital and one of the most-covered destinations in U.S. travel press, anchored by SXSW, the Austin City Limits Festival, the food economy (Franklin Barbecue and the broader Austin food scene), and the technology-industry cluster.
• Dallas and Fort Worth — the commercial-and-Western corridor, with sustained business tourism, sports tourism, and the broader DFW metropolitan tourism economy.
• Houston — the medical-arts-and-space identity, with major medical tourism, museums, NASA's Johnson Space Center, and one of the most diverse food cities in the country.
• San Antonio — the River Walk, the Alamo, and the broader Mission heritage that anchor one of the longest-standing Texas tourism traditions.
• Hill Country — Fredericksburg, Marble Falls, Wimberley, Boerne, and the wine-music-ranch culture along the US-290 corridor.
• The Gulf Coast — Galveston, Corpus Christi, South Padre Island.
• Big Bend National Park — one of the most distinctive desert-and-mountain national park experiences in the United States.
• West Texas — Marfa, Alpine, Terlingua, Fort Davis, and the broader geography that anchors Texas's mythology.

The Travel Texas program

Travel Texas operates inside the Office of the Governor's Economic Development and Tourism Division. The program manages the state's tourism marketing nationally and internationally, including the TravelTexas.com editorial layer, advertising across U.S. consumer media, and the international source-market work that targets visitors from Mexico, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the broader inbound tourism market.

The "Texas. It's like a whole other country" tagline has been one of the most consistent state-level tourism slogans in U.S. history, running across multiple administrations and providing the kind of brand continuity that compounds across decades. The slogan captures the scale, the distinctiveness, and the sense of identity that defines the Texas tourism proposition.

What makes Austin distinctive

Austin operates as a distinct destination brand within the broader Texas tourism economy. The combination of SXSW (one of the largest music, film, and technology conferences in the world), the Austin City Limits Festival, the food editorial cycle (Franklin Barbecue and the broader Austin food scene), the technology-industry presence, and the live-music infrastructure has built an Austin tourism profile that exceeds what most U.S. state capitals achieve.

The Austin model — sustained editorial across multiple verticals (music, food, technology, culture) over decades — is what built the city's tourism position. The model is portable. Texas destinations that want to build comparable depth can identify their analogous editorial verticals and sustain investment across them.

The regional destinations

Beyond the major cities, several Texas regional destinations have built distinctive tourism profiles.

Hill Country has developed as a wine, music, and ranch tourism corridor. The growth of the Texas wine industry, the live-music venues across the region, and the dude-ranch and culinary tourism have produced a category that competes with comparable wine-and-country regions in California, Oregon, and the broader U.S. market.

Big Bend National Park remains one of the most distinctive national park experiences in the United States. The remoteness, the desert-and-mountain landscape, and the broader West Texas mythology produce a tourism draw that is meaningfully different from any other national park experience.

Marfa — the small West Texas town that has become an internationally-recognized art destination through the Donald Judd legacy, the Chinati Foundation, and the broader art-and-design tourism that has built around the town — represents one of the more unusual U.S. tourism stories of the past several decades.

The Gulf Coast — Galveston, Corpus Christi, South Padre Island — produces sustained leisure tourism, family travel, and the spring break economy that contributes meaningfully to the broader Texas tourism mix.

The communications challenge

Texas tourism marketing operates against several distinctive challenges. The state's identity is strongly defined, which is both a strength (clear brand) and a challenge (the identity competes with the actual tourism product in shaping visitor expectations). The geography is large enough that visitors who experience one region may not encounter the rest of the state. The weather varies substantially across seasons and regions, requiring careful messaging about when to visit different destinations.

The Travel Texas program addresses these challenges through region-specific marketing, sustained editorial relationships with travel press, and the kind of state-level brand work that supports the regional and city-level tourism economies underneath.