THE ICONOGRAPHY OF THE TOURISM EXPERIENCE

Guides to tourism planning typically lack a language for dealing with the destination's experiential content. This article argues that touri sm planning has as its central challenge the design of effective touri stic experiences, and can find conceptual sources for this task in ico nography, the field that studies the meanings of images. In search of iconographic principles for tourism design, the article investigates N iagara Falls, still one of the foremost attractions in North America. At Niagara Falls, the article identifies two main compositional elemen ts: staging, which situates a desirable motif (in this case a waterfal l) in a stage setting; and thematizing, which links the motif to conce pts (like terror or romance) that make it evocative. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.