More than island tourism : branding, marketing and logistics in archipelago tourist destinations

Abstract

The association between islands and tourism goes much further than today’s deliberate attempts by marketing agencies to position islands as earthy paradises. It can be traced to something much older: the millenary pursuit of especially beautiful places, like the Garden of Eden watered by running streams in both the Christian and Moslem traditions (Gillis, 2004; Scafi, 2006). This quest grounds the historically young business of vacationing and tourism within a culturally diffuse and well-established practice of longing for exclusive locales that bestow peace, security and deep communion with the divine and/or the natural (Royle, 2001; Löfgren, 2002). That we continue to desire such spaces for their putative transformative energies and powers explains much of the lingering, fundamental appeal of island tourism today.