**Section 1**

**Tourism Industry – Micro and Macro Topics for Strategy Development** 

**1** 

**of 'Other' Places** 

*Department of Human Geography and Planning, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University,* 

Bouke van Gorp

*The Netherlands* 

**Guidebooks and the Representation** 

Tourism destinations do not simply exist. In what can be described as processes of symbolic transformation (Dietvorst & Ashworth, 1995), destinations are created and recreated by both tourists and tourism texts. Postcards, brochures, souvenirs, travel magazines, websites, advertisements and guidebooks all play their part in these processes. Tourism texts imbue places with meanings and create sights that tourists should see (Crang, 2004). These meanings attached to destinations can be part of wider circuits of culture and reproduce images or ideas from the literature, movies or news media. Such processes of symbolic transformation, or 'sacralization'(Crang, 2004; 71), turn ordinary places into destinations to

Tourism texts are the focus of this chapter. These texts are important for tourists because of the somewhat intangible and experimental nature of tourism (Osti et al., 2009) and because of the time lag that often exists between purchase and consumption, as "the product, the experience and destination, is normally purchased prior to arrival" (McGregor, 2000; 29). Wong and Liu (2011) thus characterise a trip as a high risk purchase involving both disposable income and free time. Searching for information, both before the purchase and during the trip, helps to reduce the risks. Tourists turn to both internal and external information sources when planning a vacation (Osti et al., 2009; Wong & Liu 2011). Internal sources are the knowledge and attitudes that people have acquired in the past through personal experience with a destination (or similar destinations). Unless tourists visit the same place over and over again, their knowledge from firsthand experience is limited. Therefore, tourists also turn to external sources of information, namely, mediated or 'second-hand' experiences from friends and family or media and tourism texts (Adams, 2009). Traditionally, tourists turned to intermediaries such as travel agencies, brochures and guidebooks for help. Today, their

Guidebooks or travel guides are still an important source of information that tourists value. According to Wong and Liu (2011), guidebooks have a competitive advantage over other information sources as they are both tangible and accessible at any time and place. Guidebooks are designed to be used during the trip, in situ (Koshar, 1998; Beck 2006), but can be used before and after the trip as well (Jack & Phipps, 2003; Nishimura et al., 2007). Another possible advantage of guidebooks over freely obtainable tourism texts, such as

information search might also include the Internet and social media.

**1. Introduction** 

visit and sites into 'must-see-sights'.
