SEMIOTICS, IDENTITY, IDEOLOGY AND TOURISM DESTINATION MARKETING

In this paper we wish to problematize tourism site/tourist interaction using ideas drawn from Peircean semiotics on the one hand and recent thinking on the ties between aesthetics and ideology on other. Linking these ideas leads to the conclusion that for any one tourist site, more information must be provided the more distant the ideology of the tourist is from that of the host country. Thus, one would expect that descriptions of a tourism site directed at the foreign tourist should be longer and provide more background that that provided the domestic tourist who, presumably, is already an interpellated subject of the host society. Analysis of tourism materials collected in Denmark show that descriptions provided to non-Danes are the same length or shorter than descriptions provided to Danes and that, in descriptions of equal length, considerable slippage occurs