ABSTRACT
A glance at any textbook of travel and tourism will produce a summary of factors which affect individuals’ propensity to travel and influence their destination awareness. Such a list would undoubtedly include available travel technology and support infrastructure, and the individual's disposable income, leisure time, level of educational achievement, and motivation. Many different methods and perspectives have been utilized to describe the components of tourism attractions/resources, including models and frameworks of tourism attraction systems which are often utilized by tourism planners and marketers to increase destination market values and competitiveness. 1 Such resources have commonly been evaluated in three ways: first, from an ideographic perspective related to the supply component of tourism products which lists those elements contributing most to destination attractiveness; secondly, from an organizational perspective which looks at their spatial and temporal linkages; and thirdly, from a cognitive perspective which examines issues of tourism demand. A full analysis of destination attractiveness and competitiveness requires a combination of such methods, considering those components of the tourism origin-destination system from both demand and supply sides. The environment of tourism destinations contains dynamic and static components which are interdependent, and also dependent upon the characteristics of the market, and which control overall destination attractiveness. Basic models of travel patterns 2 often distinguish ‘push’ factors (such as cultural, social and environmental pressures in the traveller's home country), which contribute to the desire and ability to travel, from ‘pull’ factors in the destination country, which determine the level of attractiveness to visitors. Destination awareness is created in the contemporary world by a number of factors, including the mass media, but is also conditioned by an individual's previous travel experiences and by the experiences recounted by family and friends. 3
