ABSTRACT
The world famous ‘Singapore Sling’ is a cocktail concoction unique to the grandedame of Singapore’s hotels-The Raffles. It has been said that a tou rist’s experience of the country is incomplete w ithout sampling this cocktail, luxuriating in the breezy atmosphere of The long Bar, reliving the bygone era of colonial Singapore. Together w ith but even somewhat m ore than the ‘Singapore G irl’, the ‘Instant Asia’ image and the ‘M erlion’, the ‘Singapore Sling’ is a leading icon among a group that have come to epitomize Singapore’s tourism image to the Asian region and world. As m arketing tools, these icons have been fashioned by planners of the tourist industry and m arketed as products unique to the country. In the context of tourism planning, Ashworth (1994: 17) tells us that ‘producers’ (planners, entrepreneurs, retailers and the like) often ‘select’, ‘package’ and ‘in terp re t’ whatever resources are at their disposal to create alluring tourism products and places. As such “the interpretation, not the resource, is literally the product” (Ashworth 1994: 17).
