Tourism Destination Brand Equity: A Literature Review

In recent decades, tourism has been highly motivated to boost economy. Tourism stimulates consumption and increase employment. Many countries are striving for promoting their tourist destinations to get tourists from all over the world. Under this circumstance, tourism destinationsare confronted with the problem of homogeneity, and tourists have to choose among many homogenous places. To increase destination uniqueness and competitiveness, the definition of "brand" in marketing strategy is introduced to destination management. If one tourist destination wants to gain competitiveness, it has to build up its own brand to differ itself from other competitors thus attracting tourists to visit this place instead of other places. This paper mainly illustrates destination brand equity from tourist's perspective, categorizes dimensions of destination brand equity, and integrate into a destination equity theoretical model thus to provide some managerial suggestions for destination branding.