The ambiguous image of Linz: Linz09 - European Capital of Culture

The importance of destination image is widely recognised for its significant effect on the behavioural intentions of tourists. As such, efforts to build and/or improve destination images are critical to the success of destination tourism development. An important prerequisite for the successful long-term destination image improvement and promotion is the knowledge of tourists’ perceptions of the attributes of the destination’s image. This exploratory paper seeks to obtain some insight into this particular knowledge and to provoke discussions by contrasting the projected image of Linz as a tourist destination promoted by its policy makers with the perceived image held by Linz’s potential tourists in the context of the European initiative, “Cultural Capital of Europe” 2009. The paper juxtaposes the results of Linz’s 2008 image monitoring survey conducted by its policy makers with those of an exploratory survey conducted for this study. The latter was designed to capture the image components of Linz held by a convenient sample of domestic and foreign potential tourists to Linz