Pietro Beritelli

While there is still an ongoing debate in marketing research on what logos and brands are really for, research on destination branding has adopted a rather wide interpretation of the construct. Consequently, destination branding processes have acquired different meanings and interpretations; one of those is the belief that destination logos are a powerful instrument to catch (potential) tourist's attention and to even support destination choice processes. Since particularly in practice, the creation and usage of destination logos has become an important aspect of overall destination branding, we ask whether destination logos really get recognized by visitors. A representative study for the tourist destination logos of St. Moritz, Zermatt, Luzern, and Bern reveals among others three findings: (1) Visitors are likely to recognize logos when they are at the destination and (2) if the destination's logo is displayed at different places (touch-points). (3) Respondents were likely to guess the wrong logo when they said to have seen it on online and offline media outside of the destination. The study concludes with some quite dramatic implications for the usefulness of logos and with a new meaning of ‘destination branding'.

This paper brings forward a conceptual model discussing the financial domains of luxury travel. We propose that luxury travel can not only be assessed from an absolute travel expenses perspective (travel expenses of the potentially affluent, i.e. tycoons, high net worth individuals, or rich, etc.) but a perspecitve needs to be included which accounts for travel expenses in relation to resources, such as income. We test to what extent objective (destination choice, accommodation choice, and trip duration) and subjective (travel motiviation, travel type) travel descriptors can predict if a given trip in the above context can be considered a luxury (vs. a budget) trip. The result for the case of Switzerland - a mature and sophisticated market - reveal that luxury travel does not only constitute intercontinental travel with staying in five star plus hotels but incorporates a much broader variety of travel components, very much dependent on the perception of the traveller.