Travel Reference
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are reproduced in the discursive practices of organizational members (Johansson and Heide
2007: 297). This is more evident in the area of tourism where the ability to establish or not a
dominant discourse and derivate from it a series of hegemonic narratives that frame and provides
meaning to the expectation-experience of an event-place depends on the level of orchestrated
complexity that a tourism-reputation system is able to achieve.
Tourism, events and public relations
Setting aside unplanned events such as natural and human disasters (that also impact the tourism
industry with regard to its investment in intelligence and surveillance services, risk and crisis
management) public relations motivations lie behind created events - 'they exhibit many
elements of religious evangelism and old style salvationism' (Rojek 2013: ix). Information
regarding these events is tightly controlled and advance information may be restricted, for
example, at the Beijing and London Olympics, where the nature and contents of the opening
ceremonies were kept a close secret despite the making distinctive claims of openness. In the case
of London this had the advantage in terms of media handling because broadcast journalists, who
were apparently unable to describe the unfolding episodic fantasy in front of them, appeared
extremely reliant on a script that necessarily incorporated positive interpretations. Consequently,
live media presented an uncritical view and much of the media discourse was around issues of
national pride and historical achievement.
In the case of the London Olympics of 2012, part of the opening ceremony was used to
promote the National Health Service - only a couple of weeks after the Olympics it was
announced that the NHS 'brand' was to be marketed internationally, so the reason for its inclusion
in the opening ceremony appeared to be driven by a marketing tactic. While mega-events (such
as those for good causes) offer apparent transformative potential they operate within a status quo
and may simply distract from more fundamental questions of social justice and structural change.
The best example of this is the celebrity-led media event (sometimes defi ned as 'celebrity
activism') to collect funding for foreign aid, which despite successfully raising important resources
obviates a series of questions in relation to the nature of aid, the political regimes which will
access those resources or the disparity and inequality in the comparative lifestyles between the
celebrities promoting the event and those whom the event claims to favour.
We can claim that these constructed media events (Dayan 1994; Marriott 2007) are the catalyst
to activate the different components of the tourism-reputation systems by creating a sense of
community. These events - which are now devised specifi cally for the mass media - have been
part of human history for millennia, a form of communication that performs and celebrates
collective identifi cations through shared meanings of values and ideologies. Examples include the
Roman Games, vast political rallies such as those conducted by the Nazis at Nuremburg or more
recently mass weddings conducted by the Moonies. While all event-places have personal and
cultural signifi cance of some scale, some event-places in touristic terms are globally iconic and the
focus of massive formal and informal media comment, social media, rumour, gossip and speculation.
The Diana and Dodi Memorial located at the Harrods store in London became a main tourism
attraction created by social networking rather than by any type of formal promotion.
As suggested earlier, historically, event-places have had a propaganda purpose as they propagate
a particular ideology. Cuba, for example, besides the natural beauties, also attracts tourism fl ows
thanks to the reputation-system that presents the island as a benign socialist experiment and nowa-
days as a historic relic of the Soviet era that still has resonance among some liberal and left-wing
intellectuals. The fact that they are linked with business, trade and globalization makes no differ-
ence to this. The same can be said, however, of places such as NewYork and how it connects with
