Exploring tourists' images of a distant destination

This work evaluates diverse explorative techniques as tools to identify tourist image perceptions of distant places. The findings demonstrate the importance of employing various techniques in recognising peoples' knowledge and opinions of places as a first step in analysing tourist images. Further, the findings illustrate that word association, picture association and collage technique in combination acknowledge the similarities and diversities of images that potential tourists hold of a certain destination. The study also analyses tourists from different cultural backgrounds (i.e. various nationalities) and knowledge (i.e. previous visits and other types of information) in terms of image perception of a distant destination. Based on these analyses, the study discusses and suggests potential image characteristics as a foundation for creating a competitive brand image for destinations striving to become successful tourist destinations. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.