The evolution of tourism destination image through travel guidebooks – the case of barcelona

• Autores: Raul Suhett de Morais
• Directores de la Tesis: Gemma Cànoves Valiente (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2019
• Idioma: español
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Maria-Dolores Garcia-Ramon (presid.), Luis Garay (secret.), Saida Palou Rubio (voc.)
• Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Geografía por la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona
• Materias:
  • Geografía
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en: TESEO
• Resumen

  • Travel guidebooks are an exceptional source of information for future tourists. These books provide advices, suggestions, clues, tips, and much more so that the traveler can understand the Destination, being, therefore, a mediator between the visitor and the place visited. Travel guidebooks shape the tourist’s experience by interpreting the Destination and, by doing so, shape the Destination itself as well. In a time when tourists are rushing to the Internet to find always-changing information similar to an Orwellian world where yesterday’s facts disappear, paper guidebooks are crucial to a longitudinal because the Tourism Destination Image (TDI) they have of any given place lasts as long as their pages exist. My research aims to understand how a TDI changes through time and, in order to do so, I employ the Grounded Theory Method (GTM) to gather data from several Travel Guidebooks from different periods and determine how the image changes throughout time. The research is built over a review of the current literature on Geography, Authenticity, and, of course, Tourism. My case study is Barcelona and I have selected 13 guidebooks from 1888 –the year of the first Universal Exposition– to 2016. Due to the immense amount of data and the fragility of some guidebooks, I use the computer assisted qualitative data analysis software ATLAS.ti to help me with the coding, recoding, visualization, retrieving, and analysis of the books. Tourism Research is known to strongly rely on other areas’ theories and methods to understand the phenomenon’s intricate problems. Both working with travel guidebooks and applying the GTM to Tourism Research is an innovative way to provide the subject with its own research frameworks and it can help develop new paradigms, theories, and practices to the field. The research concludes that using travel guidebooks as source of data to analyze Barcelona’s TDI is a valid method and it can be reproduced in any other Destination; that Barcelona has had several TDIs throughout its history as a Tourism Destination and the one we experience nowadays is only the most recent one; that a longitudinal study through a GTM framed by a Case Study Research is a valid way to understand the evolution of a Destination’s TDI; that the history of the Destination influences its TDI; that Barcelona’s Grounded image has changed according to trends of each period in its history, but its Density image has remained stable focused in the Barri Gòtic. Finally, this Thesis presents some topics to future research.