L'immagine di una destinazione turistica in una prospettiva attribute-based. Risultati di un'indagine empirica

Any territory today has to communicate in order to render visible to the outside world what it is, what it knows how to do, its qualities and its value in order to improve its image, which represents one of the fundamental components of the intangible patrimony of a destination. In the paste, the tourist marketing literature has concentrated on the image perceived by travellers. Very limited, instead, have been studies on the image perceived by tourist intermediaries, who constitute an important category of mediation in the diffusion of the image of a territory and take on a remarkable role in the development of tourist destinations. The main objective of the present study is to analyze the image of Sicily as perceived by French and English tour operators. We detected the image of Sicily using Gartner’s model according to which the image is made up of three components: cognitive, affective and conative. Our study made it possible to identify the strong and weak points of the destination Sicily with tour operators located in two markets of major importance for Sicilian tourism. The results presented here could therefore constitute an opportunity for all those private firms and policy makers that intend to develop marketing actions directed at the segment constituted by tourist intermediaries.