Culture, identity and tourism representation: marketing Cymru or Wales?

Abstract

This article attempts to contribute to the development of a critical analysis of tourism representations through an investigation of destination branding strategies. Based on an analysis of the marketing campaigns of the Wales Tourist Board and Welsh local authorities, it argues that the influence of repressive and liberating historical, political and cultural discourses can be discerned in the tourism representations used in contemporary branding strategies and these explain why Wales is differentially branded in its overseas and UK markets. Whilst Wales provides the focus for this discussion of the relationship between discourse, tourism representations and destination marketing, the same analysis could be applied to representations of other tourism destinations.