Edinburgh Napier University

  Tourism makes a major contribution to most economies particularly
developing economies. In developing countries, tourism is important as a
means of earning hard currencies and creating employment. Therefore
the means of stimulating tourism and promoting potential destinations is
worthy of investigation. In this thesis the focus is on investigating the use
of images of nations' culture and heritage to promote those destinations in
the developing world to affluent western tourists.
An extensive literature review is undertaken in the thesis to demonstrate
and understand the relationship between place and its portrayal to give
expectations in the minds of tourists. There are many means of portraying
the images, notably television, the Internet and paper based brochures
which are the subject of this thesis. This review led to the construction of
the hypothesis that if images are realistic depictions of place then
expectations will be closer to experience. If this gap is small then it is
further hypothesised that satisfaction will result. To explore and test this
hypothesis a positivist research approach is pursued. The research
method used is principally that of case studies in which three countries
(Egypt, India and Turkey) are taken as representative of
developing/emerging nations. First, the use of images to promote travel to
these countries is tested by conducting a content analysis of "quality
broadsheet" newspapers. Then a questionnaire based survey is
undertaken to understand how people from affluent backgrounds perceive
samples of images emphasising culture and heritage and how they identify
the images with place. Next, samples of first time tourists to Egypt, India
and Turkey are surveyed before experiencing the destination and again
after visiting the destination. Then to add depth, samples of the tourists
surveyed were interviewed and invited to discuss their experiences.
The findings of the content analysis resulted in evidence to support the
premise that images of culture and heritage are used to promote
destinations to affluent potential tourists. From the first survey, results
showed that on the whole potential tourists correctly associated images
with the destination. Further, it was found that images judged to be
realistic, raised expectations in the minds of potential tourists. Then from
the pre and post visit survey, factor analysis was used to create measures
of expectations of place and measures of experience of place. The gap
between the measures of experience and expectation was then computed
and found to be negatively correlated with satisfaction. The in depth
interviews gave similar findings to the quantitative analysis and by
triangulation helped to validate the research.
Thus the hypothesis that accurate representation of place based on
culture and heritage imagery leads to expectations which are close to
experience is accepted. Further, it was found that if the
expectation/experience gap is small then satisfaction is likely to result.
These findings give valuable tools, whether company based or in national
development agencies, to ensure that the accuracy of portrayal of cultural
images to promote destinations to affluent consumers and thus ensuring
satisfaction is more likely, which in turn results in an increase in the
potential for return visits.