ABSTRACT
It has been suggested that tourists’ imagination and consumption of destinations are no longer primarily infl uenced by destinations’ promotion material such as brochures and advertisements. Contemporary tourists are infl uenced by media products like literature and fi lm to a much higher degree in Western societies (Morgan and Pritchard, 1998). For instance, Rosslyn Chapel receives literary pilgrims paying tribute to The Da Vinci Code and New Zealand has experienced a boom of tourist arrivals after the fi lm release of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The connection is not new: the romance between art, literature, and travel has existed since the Grand Tour Period. What is new is the increased commercial sophistication of the merging between tourism and various popular media products.
