标题：Tourism and hospitality marketing: fantasy, feeling and fun原文：Experiential marketing has become a cornerstone of many recent advances in areas such as retailing, branding and events marketing, but with attempting to sell an experience of a place through relating it to the lifestyle constructs of consumers. For many years we have discussed the characteristics of tourism and hospitality products, which suggest that marketing within the sectors is different to many other industries, as purchase decisions are made on the basis of projected and perceived images, rather than prior experience. However, despite the amount of literature being written on these perceived differences, most marketing in the sector relies heavily on traditional marketing concepts, and it is often difficult to discriminate tourism and hospitality approaches to marketing from those advocated for other consumer products.Tourism and hospitality has become a major economic activity as expectations with regard to the use of our leisure time have evolved, attributing greater meaning to our free time. The evolution of tourist behaviour encourages both change and the emergence of new meaning (Bouchet et al., 2004). This results in marketing having potentially a greater prominence in tourism and hospitality, than in other industries. Potential that is not always fully achieved (Morgan and Pritchard, 2002). The key reason for this failing is that in the main marketing for tourism and hospitality has been focussed not on the consumer, but on the destination or outlet, with marketing strategies being related to the products offered (Williams, 2000, 2002). As marketing within this sector has evolved however, the offer has become increasingly less important due to the enormous heterogeneity of consumer motivation and behaviour. The result is that firms and destinations within this sector need to redefine their strategies to reflect these changes.Studying the behaviour of consumers has become increasingly complex, and it is fair to argue that tourism and hospitality by its very nature, should be in the vanguard of research into contemporary consumers (Williams, 2002). Tourism and hospitality offers a multitude of venues in which people can consume. Bars, restaurants, hotels, theme parks, casinos and cruise ships all operate as “Cathedrals of consumption” (Ritzer, 1999) offering increasingly complex consumption opportunities to increasinglycomplex consumers. Tourism and hospitality has developed into one of the most important global economic activities, due in part to a combination of a transformation of offers and increasingly postmodern demand. These changes mean that tourism and hospitality consumption has evolved to become more qualitative, more demanding, and more varied (Bouchet et al., 2004).Anecdotal evidence delivered through media coverage, would suggest that contemporary consumers are self-indulgent, pleasure seeking individuals, easily dominated by marketers and advertisers, who act like sheep in the ways they mimic referent others. However, the reality is obviously much more complex than such a scenario suggests. Contemporary consumers are as likely to be driven by thrift as to they are to be hedonistic, they use consumption to make statements about themselves, they use consumption to create their identities and they develop a sense of belonging through consumption. For many people it is through consumption that relationships are formed, for example, colleagues enjoying a drink after work or children hosting their birthday parties at McDonalds, enabling them to define their circle of friends .Consumption also plays a part in finding fulfilment, developing creativity and expressing their individual abilities. Clearly such a complex phenomena cannot be easily understood.Recent arguments have been sounded that aspects of contemporary tourism and hospitality consumption have reflected the phenomena of postmodernism. Whilst many believe postmodernism to be a meaningless intellectual fad, inaccessible to many involved in marketing within our sector, others agree that there are worthwhile insights to be gained from the debate on the post-modern condition and its consequences for tourism and hospitality consumption and marketing. I do not intend to discuss at length the use of post-modern discourse in tourism and hospitality marketing as I have exercised it in previous work (Williams, 2000, 2002). The term postmodernism refers to a break in thinking away from the modern, functional and rational, and during the last couple of decades it has spread across all domains of knowledge, including marketing. The key concepts of post-modern marketing are fragmentation, indeterminacy and distrust of universal discourse, but by eschewing modernism it introduces a radically new and different cultural movement which coalesces in a reconceptualisation of how we experience and explain our world. In terms of experiential marketing two aspects of the post-modern d