| Summary: | Customer-based brand equity for tourism destinations (CBBE-TD) is
a helpful construct to assess destination branding effectiveness.
However, it would be even more useful if it could be integrated into
a wider methodological approach articulating destination brand
assessment with the destination choice process. This paper
describes a new research programme – Favourite Destinations
Worldwide – that includes three interrelated innovative tools: (1)
the destination brand choice model that allows a better
conceptualization of CBBE-TD in the context of destination choice;
(2) the Tower of Babel platform, a multilingual online survey for
data gathering, to assess CBBE-TD of all destinations competing in
the world market; and (3) the Destination Brand Gnosis, a propriety
software for qualitative data analysis, transforming the meta-data
into a system for constantly evaluating brand attractiveness.
Additionally, for illustrative purposes empirical data from two
national samples is presented: Portuguese (N = 524) and Brazilian
(N = 955). Besides presenting the preferred destination brands for
Brazilian and Portuguese tourists, the results confirm a basic
assumption supporting this research program related to the
geographic polarization of the most valued destination brands:
“dream destination brands” correspond to destinations located
farther from respondents’ home-places, in other continents,
requiring long-haul air travel, while “favourite destination brands”
are predominantly destinations located nearer, in respondents’
own countries or neighbouring countries.
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