Best travel destination marketing campaigns of 2022

(CNN) — When they’re good, they’re iconic. When they’re bad — well, at least you can usually laugh. We’re talking destination campaigns — when travel hotspots make a bid for your hard-earned vacation cash by producing extravagant videos and entire websites to grab your attention.

So how have they been this year — the first year since the pandemic started with few restrictions for most of us travelers? With destinations desperate for post-lockdown cash, we’ve seen exorbitant amounts of money plowed into getting celebrities on board, shooting the very finest footage of the locations, and, happily, some real imagination of how places want to present themselves.

From the weird (Iceland’s typing horses) to the wonderful (South Africa’s emotional reopening), the bad (as in evil — Sweden recreated “The Blair Witch Project”) to the controversial (David Beckham’s plug for Qatar), here are 15 of the videos that caught our attention this year.

South Africa: The rebirth

Released in March, when much of the world was still in lockdown, South Africa’s three-minute video was a brilliant take on how travel could look as things started opening up post-Omicron — a brave move, since the variant was first spotted in South Africa, and the country…