Tourism development in North Iceland: The issues of seasonality and image production

The growth of tourism worldwide continues unabated, to the extent that tourism, as part of the consumer culture in modern Western economies and increasingly worldwide, has been acknowledged to powerfully generate and reproduce cultural and environmental discourses (Norton, 1996). It has also been argued that current tourist consumption is overwhelmingly ‘sign-driven’, and creation and consumption of images has become an indispensable part of the whole tourist process (MacCannell, 1976). In other words, tourist places are embedded in ‘consumer culture’ and their images have become subject to perpetual construction and manipulation via different marketing media. Among the different media utilized by tourism marketing stakeholders, tourist brochures are probably the most ubiquitous and rich with photographic images (Hunter, 2008: 357). The brochures, obviously, aim to create a positive and attractive image of a place, motivating tourists to choose one place over another as their travel destination. Apart from that, however, images are capable of conveying what Edelheim (2006: 5) calls ‘hidden messages’, i.e. simultaneously reinforcing certain hegemonic discourses, existing within a particular society. This suggestion, however, should not be understood as an exposure of ‘hidden agendas’ of the brochure producers, but rather as an attempt to draw closer attention to the taken-for-granted views and ‘self-evident truths’, existing in the society and how these can often be problematic. This report, therefore, takes on the challenges of tourism seasonality in Iceland within the context of the (re)production of discourses identifiable through the images of tourist places and analyses them with the help of semiotics as deployed within tourism research. The main goal of this report is to explore both the issues of seasonality in North Iceland and its tourist images and see how they interconnect.