Comparative Measurement of the Brands of Tourism Destinations

Abstract

Issues surrounding the branding of tourism destinations are important for managers because destination image can be used to positively affect a potential customer’s perceptions and so influence purchases of holidays to that destination. Research into the branding of tourism destinations concentrates on the branding of individual destinations. However, it would be useful for marketers to have an overall measure of brand equity to assist in the comparison of tourism brands across the industry. Thus this paper presents a way to measure customer-based brand equity of a number of tourism destinations, to compare them. The research contributes to the fields of brand equity and tourism marketing, empirically investigating brand marketing concepts in the new context of the tourism industry.