The author describes the Internet Guide to Travel Health

in the following way: ‘‘This compilation of Web sites servesas a handy, useful, and easy-to-consult guide for personstraveling near or far, or for armchair travelers’’ (p. 1).The assessment is accurate, but sells the book short.This is a very comprehensive collection of resources,thoughtfully chosen and balanced in order to provide athorough coverage of the topic. Because the chosenwebsites provide free information and are overallwell established and very reputable, the book will not date

as quickly as other internet guides. Given its comprehen-sive coverage, it should be on the desk and readilyaccessible to anyone working in the broad field of travelhealth.

Jeff WilksCentre for Tourism and Risk Management,

The University of Queensland 4305, Australia

E-mail address: j.wilks@uq.edu.au

doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2005.10.001

S. Pike, Destination marketing organizations, Elsevier,

Oxford, ISBN 0-08-044306-0, 2004 (p. 240 (hbk)).

Destination Marketing Organisations (DMOs) is to behugely welcomed as an addition to the destinationmarketing literature. This book is a very good text andwill, no doubt, quickly become a useful reference for bothundergraduates and those working in the industry. Thevast majority of tourist experiences and activities occur intourism destinations of some description and indeed,DMOs in one guise or another have played a leading rolein tourism development since the nineteenth century. Yet,given their importance and often fascinating histories, theemergence of a sizeable literature focusing on theiroperations, structures and challenges has been surprisinglyslow (e.g. Morgan, Pritchard, & Pride, 2004; Ruddy &Flanagan, 1999), and a number of important areas(including: governance; funding; stakeholder relationships;competitiveness; performance) continue to remain under-researched. One of the key strengths of Pike’s text,therefore, is his overview of an impressive range of workin areas including branding, strategic planning and humanresource management—and his subsequent ability tosynthesise this reading into a coherent and very accessibleseries of discussions on DMOs. This wide-ranging litera-ture review, together with the author’s own experiences ofworking in DMOs in New Zealand and Australia,supplemented by his doctoral research, make for a bookwhich engages with a wide range of material and managesto achieve a reasonable global coverage. Other strengths ofPike’s book lie in his coverage of some of the above-mentioned neglected areas, including performance mea-surement (dealt within Chapter 9) and his addressing of theimportant and topical area of crisis management. Also tobe welcomed is his willingness (still unusual in such texts)to foreground and contextualise his own position as anacademic and former DMO CEO (pp. 15–17), an approachechoed in his decisions to include ‘chapter perspectives’

instead of chapter introductions or overviews to open everychapter.The book is composed of the successive chapters:

Introduction to DMOs; The Rationale for DMOs; DMORoles and Structure; Destination Branding; DestinationImage; Destination Positioning; Destination Marketing;DMOs, Disasters and Crises; Performance Measures. Eachof these chapters deals with a key aspect of DMOs,drawing on the author’s own industry experience and anextensive reading of the marketing, branding and destina-tion marketing literatures. The book opens with anintroductory chapter which firmly positions the text as‘designed primarily for use by undergraduate students oftourism, travel and hospitality’ on the very sound basis thatan understanding of DMO roles, operations and challengesshould ‘not only be a prerequisite for those seeking a careerin destination marketing, but should be regarded asessential for those who will become active stakeholders ofsuch organisations’ (p. 2).This introduction is followed by Chapter 2’s analysis of

the rationale for establishing DMOs and discussion of thehistory and origins of such organisations. Indeed, one of thelikeable features of the book as a whole is that most of thekey branding and marketing concepts and theories areextensively contextualised so that the reader has a real senseof where and how these ideas originated. In the case of thediscussion of the history of public sector involvement intourism, it is a little disappointing that (like so many tourismacademics), Pike’s comment that ‘the published literature onhistorical tourism is sparse’ (p. 21) fails to acknowledge theextensive work done in this area by social historians such asWalton (1983, 2000), but, nonetheless, his discussion stillprovides a good context which demonstrates how little thestate has valued tourism and its benefits.Overall, the book is structured so that, once DMOs are

introduced and key terms defined in Chapter 1, Chapter 2outlines DMO’s history and rationales, and Chapter 3analyses their roles and structures. Then, Chapters 4–6follow a model of the destination brand construct as

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consisting of brand identity, brand image and brandpositioning. Thus, Chapter 4 discusses the elements of abrand identity, which represents the self-image, whileChapter 5 discusses brand image as representing the‘actual’ image held by consumers. Chapter 6 then focuseson positioning as a means of enhancing congruencebetween brand identity and brand image. The text thencovers marketing the destination in Chapter 7, respondingto crises and disasters in Chapter 8 and measuringperformance in Chapter 9. This provides a cohesive andlogical overall structure and, when combined with eachchapter’s opening paragraph entitled ‘Chapter Perspective’and its closing ‘Chapter Key Point Summary’ make for aneasily navigable text for undergraduates and practitioners.

This is undoubtedly a very useful text, which is groundedin a scholarly synthesis of the literature, yet which isaccessible and should, therefore, be highly recommended tothose working for and in partnership with, DMOs, as wellas the undergraduate audience it was primarily aimed at.Certainly, its strength lies in blending a sound empiricalapproach (based on the author’s own experiences andresearch) with a comprehensive review of a range ofliteratures, firmly anchored in a clear explanation ofbranding and marketing theory. The author has succeededin his stated aim of aiding the development of anunderstanding of the issues relating to the rationale forDMOs, their structures, roles and challenges and thecomplexities of marketing destinations as tourism brands.Above all, he has endeavoured to provide another bridge

between academic theory and research and ‘the ‘‘realworld’’ of DMO practice’ (p. 3).Despite its richness and range of coverage, there remains

much more to be written on DMOs; including a need forwork that explores the wider relationships between DMOsand their constituents and stakeholders and for work whichexplores the connections between tourism destinationbranding and place marketing, tackling the complexitiesof the often competing agendas of economic developmentand tourism promotion agencies. Finally, there continuesto be a pressing need for many more multi-disciplinarystudies of place and there must be more meaningfuldialogues between academics and the industry—dialogueswhich this book will surely further stimulate.

References

Morgan, N., Pritchard, A., & Pride, R. (2004). Destination branding (2nd

ed.). Oxford: Elsevier.

Ruddy, J., & Flanagan, S. (1999). Tourism destination marketing:

Gaining the competitive edge. In Conference Proceedings of the

European conference of the Travel and Tourism Research Association.

Walton, J. (1983). The English seaside resort; A social history 1750–1914.

New York: St Martin’s Press.

Walton, J. (2000). The British seaside. Holiday and resorts in the twentieth

century. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Nigel MorganUniversity of Wales Institute, Colchester Avenue,

Cardiff, Wales CF23 9XR, UK

E-mail address: nmorgan@uwic.ac.uk

doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2005.10.002

Carolyn Cartier, Alan A. Lew (Eds.), Seductions of Place:

Geographical Perspectives on Globalization and Touristed

Landscapes, Routledge, London, ISBN 0-415-19219-6, 2005

(pbk, £24.99, 340pp.).

Seductions of Place is an ambitious project which seeksto examine interconnections between the new culturalgeography and tourism studies. It uses a series of casestudies at different scales, across different timelines and indifferent cultural contexts to explore how landscapes areperceived, understood, experienced and changed as a resultof tourism. More particularly, the book seeks to movebeyond cultural explanations and representations of land-scape as a static component of tourist experience to amulti-sensory, subjective geography of tourist experienceand practice. Cartier lays the book’s ambitions bare:

The project set up a number of interrelated intellectualproblems: how to reread landscape as touristed; ways ofretheorizing the relationship between tourists and the

toured, ‘travelers’ and ‘locals’ and who is a ‘tourist’;what constitutes place seduction (as opposed to sense ofplace) and landscape desire; and the context of thesemeanings, processes, and formations in an era of(dramatically uneven) globalization (p. 8).

Cartier identifies two central ideas that orient the book:touristed landscapes and seductions of place. Touristed

landscapes is intended to represent landscapes patronisedby tourists but that are also historically generated as aresult of economic and social processes occurring overspace and time (p. 3). In this way, the activity of tourism isnot the defining feature of the landscape but rather anintegral part of a more complex social and economicsystem of leisure production and consumption. Seductions

of place denotes the subjective encounters with place thatattract, entice and produce a liminal experience (p. 5).Together, these ideas provide some very powerful andcritical understandings about the role that tourism andtourists play in the production and consumption of leisurelandscapes. But to suggest that the distinction between

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