ABSTRACT
Understanding tourism as a marketing process is a matter of perspective (Tribe 2009). A common, if not the common view, tends to think of marketing communications as information about attributes of the ‘tour product’ such as price, quality, luxury, location etc., which are integrated into tourism choices. In this psychological view of tourism (Mannell and Iso-Ahola 1987), the nature of marketing communications is information. The process is a cognitive one, based on stimulus and response. And the role of marketers herein is to channel the information to the correct tourist segment as effectively and effi ciently as possible. The key purpose of marketing communications is to connect to salient tourist motivations and enhance their propensity to choose between products, brands or destinations across the tourism market (Smith 1994).
