Tourists' consumption and interpretation of sport event imagery

In an era when popular and mass cultures are positioned further up the symbolic hierarchy, sport events are deemed by cities to be a valuable image or branding tools. Event strategies are often justified by their envisaged image effects and the celebrities, iconic structures and media exposure associated with sport events means that they are viewed as being particularly effective for this purpose. This paper evaluates the image effects of strategies deployed by three English cities; Birmingham, Manchester and Sheffield. Each of these cities has used a combination of regular sport fixtures, ‘mega’ sport events and event bids to further their reputations as tourist destinations. Semi-structured interviews with a representative sample of potential tourists were used to provide evidence of the impacts of these initiatives. Despite some participants making connections with traffic chaos and violence, in general sport events appear to have encouraged positive connotations amongst potential tourists, including modernity, progress and vitality. Events seem to be regarded favourably at a cultural level, generating widespread positive meanings even when individual preferences vary. This has positive implications for cities deploying sport events as re-imaging or branding tools

An exploratory study on the use of information sources by consumers to select Australian regional travel agencies

[Abstract]: This research investigates the information sources consumers used to select regional travel agencies to make their travel arrangements. The research design involves two stages, in-depth interviews with 13 participants and a mail-out survey of 400. The in-depth interviews highlighted the need to remove three particular information sources (travel guidebooks, travel or automotive clubs and local tourist offices) for inclusion in the mail-out survey and replaced with two other information sources (television lifestyle programs and travel consultants) worthy of investigation. The mail-out survey revealed that personal experience was the most important information source used in the selection of a regional travel agency whilst yellow pages were identified as the least influential. The findings highlighted the relative importance of the 11 information sources investigated and also suggested that informal sources were more important than formal sources when consumers search for information sources to assist them with their selection of the travel agencies to patronise