Searching for Nature and Imagining New Zealand

Abstract

This paper discusses how certain travel motivations and holiday expectations are created by constantly evolving values within the cultural frame of everyday life in the generating countries. This argument imposes critical implications for planners and marketers of tourist destinations who constantly need to (re)create and (re)invent the image of ‘their’ localities. Interviews with international visitors to New Zealand have shown that emerging green values created the important socio-cultural frame for New Zealand to derive its lure as a tourist destination.

Key Words:

• Travel motivations
• images
• green values