City Tourism National Capital Perspectives

City tourism has grown rapidly and spread well beyond tourist-historic cities and resorts. Most cities now aspire to be tourism destinations and tourism has become a priority for developers and policy makers. National capitals are particularly important, since as well as being destinations in their own right, they act as gateways to their coutnry, present the nations to the rest of the world an play a vital role in establishing national image and identity. Desite this, national capital tourism, like city tourism more generally, has suffered from a lack of research and analysis, limiting our understanding of how the qualities of these cities interact with changing tourism demands.

With a focus on city tourism themes, this book draws on original research to investigate tourism in national capitals in detail, considering image and branding, the visitor experience, visitor markets and tourism development. The book takes a broad international approach and provides detailed case studies of many different types of national capital--ranging from global capitals like London and re-emerging capitals such as Budapest, to planned capitals like Canberra or Ottawa. This new research gives innovative perspectives on city tourism that will prove valuable for researchers, students of tourism and urban studies and for policy makers.