Tourists' Images of a Destination-An Alternative Analysis

Tourism research has traditionally tackled the question of destination choice by asking visitors to rank attributes identified by the analyst and to indicate the degree to which they measure up to prior expectations. The current presentation offers an alternative qualitative methodology to the gauging of satisfaction, motivation and experience by focusing on tourists and examining the linguistic content of their mental images. The case study is that of Barbados and winter visitors to that Caribbean island. In supplying details of their own projected images and responses to pictorial stimuli in both pre and on-trip situations, they provide a framework for analysis at three levels. While cognitive appraisal of the destination is explored by means of mental comparison, the affective dimension reveals a vocabulary of motive. Finally, there is a cognitive component of imagery in which tourists project themselves into an imagined scenario as if they had already experienced it. These various layers of subjective meaning may be collectively understood as analogous to the discourse of advertising.