ABSTRACT
The (small) island tourist experience needs to be smartly packaged, to be just as smartly consumed. For this to happen, such experiences need to invoke and exploit the combined effects of island identity, scale, distance from mainland, power asymmetry and the archipelagic (multi-island) condition. This chapter reviews each of these five seminal traits and explains their collective and comprehensive relevance to a tourism experience that is different precisely because it unfolds on small islands. These observations are made in contrast to the glossy exotic (and at times erotic) stereotypes of island spaces and their island peoples. Islands and islanders struggle to shape suitable representations of themselves: sufficiently authentic to reflect reality; but sufficiently scripted to entice and seduce, especially so if they happen to be warm water destinations that heavily depend on tourism revenues.
