Destination-Promoted And Visitor-Generated Images – Do They Represent Similar Stories?

Drawing on the concept of mediation and scripting, this chapter applies a content-extraction method in an attempt to identify similarities and differences between images used by destination marketers and those shared by tourists at the visit and post-visit stages, and, most importantly, to identify the values created by the shared images for audiences in tourism settings. The official image data were selected from photo galleries of the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation (GPTMC) website (gophila.com), resulting in 412 samples. Similarities of images provided on the GoPhila photo galleries within and between categories prove that destination marketing organizations have typically used similar types of images to communicate notions of the tourist experience to reinforce the desired image in the minds of potential travellers. On the other hand, based on the high similarities in regional, local and global semantics, it is also evident that some tourists tend to reproduce the same types of images projected to them at the pre-visit stage, resulting in continuous reproduction of destination representation.