The iconography of the tourism experience

Guides to tourism planning typically lack a language for dealing with the destination's experiential content. This article argues that tourism planning has as its central challenge the design of effective touristic experiences, and can find conceptual sources for this task in iconography, the field that studies the meanings of images. In search of iconographic principles for tourism design, the article investigates Niagara Falls, still one of the foremost attractions in North America. At Niagara Falls, the article identifies two main compositional elements: staging, which situates a desirable motif (in this case a waterfall) in a stage setting; and thematizing, which links the motif to concepts (like terror or romance) that make it evocative.