ABSTRACT
Destination image has emerged as a crucial and widely studied concept within the tourism literature. The image of a destination is an important topic for tourism marketers, primarily because the research has illustrated that destination images and tourists’ purchase decisions are positively correlated (e.g., Mayo, 1973; Mayo & Jarvis, 1981; Woodside & Lysonski, 1989). The importance of destination image has led to an increasingly large body of research on such topics as the images of particular places (e.g., Echtner & Ritchie, 1993; Gartner & Hunt, 1987; Mayo, 1973) and the communication of images (e.g., Bhattacharyya, 1997; Weightman, 1987). In his review of the literature, Pike (2002a) identified no less that 142 studies on this topic, published between 1973 and 2000.
