ABSTRACT
Places, and images of places, are fundamental to the practice of tourism. The demand for tourism commonly emanates from individual or collective perceptions of tourist experiences that are usually firmly rooted in associations with particular places, whilst the promotion and marketing of tourism depends heavily upon the formation and dissemination of positive and attractive images of destinations as places. Tourism therefore maps the globe in a distinctive, though highly subjective, manner, and one of the ways in which we may view the geography of tourism is as a visible manifestation of perceptions and images of what constitute tourism places. However, as those perceptions and images are recast and re-formed-in response to changing public expectations, tastes, fashions, levels of awareness, mobility and affluence-new tourism geographies emerge, overlying or even superseding previous patterns as different forms of tourism promote new areas of interest. This chapter explores some of the ways through which such tourism geographies are formed and in concluding the volume as a whole, points up some of the new directions in which tourism appears to be moving.
