Tourism, Security and Safety From Theory to Practice

13
Public Relations and
Advertising Strategies for
Managing Tourist Destination
Image Crises
Eli Avraham
Learning Objectives
■
To understand the meaning of destination marketing.
■
To become familiar with the concept of destination image management.
■
To learn the techniques for creating and promoting destination images.
■
To understand media strategies for improving destination images.
■
To understand the factors that shape destination images.
Background
Image crises occur frequently to tourist destinations all around the world. Crime
waves, terrorist activities, interracial conflicts, epidemics, and natural disasters
(earthquakes, hurricanes, mud slides, and floods) are widely covered in the
national and international media. As we know, the media plays an important role
in travel patterns since it has the power to shape the public’s perception of a desti-
nation, conflict, and issue (Santana, 2003). Overnight, the bad press of crisis
events can empty out hotels, cancel flights, and leave tourist attractions desolate.
They have an instant and far-reaching negative effect on the tourism industry of the
affected cities, regions, and countries. On the other hand, in contrast to the sudden
negative image, tourist destinations can also gradually develop a negative image,
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as the cumulative result of ongoing, long-term problems, such as a decline in the
local tourism industry, low-quality services, hotels that are not well maintained,
neglected tourist attractions, lack of general upkeep, rising crime rates, unemploy-
ment, and a difficult socioeconomic situation. In such cases, just as in the case of
a sudden downturn in image resulting from a particular crisis, an unfavorable
image is projected in the media and has a corresponding negative effect on the
local tourism industry and on potential tourists’ buying behavior.
Whatever the cause of the negative image, be it a sudden crisis or a prolonged
period of decline, many destinations suffer from being identified as scary, danger-
ous, boring, or gloomy; places a tourist would have no interest in visiting. Many
decision makers in the local tourism industry stand by helplessly, frustrated by
their knowledge that, in most cases, the negative image is not based on facts found
on the ground. Given that stereotypes are not easily changed or dismissed, the chal-
lenge facing these decision makers is great. An analysis of many tourist crises,
however, shows that numerous tourism destinations throughout the world have
managed to change a negative image into a positive one and bring back the tourists.
To achieve this lofty goal, a number of communications strategies are used. This
chapter proposes to analyze these strategies and present those most successful for
altering an unflattering public image.