Tourism is a promise and destinations communicate the credibility of that promise by means of destination brands. Branding has become a key tool for tourism destinations to make explicit the complexity of experiences to be expected by tourists visiting a destination. This paper provides a comprehensive literature review of various issues associated with tourism destination branding. It brings together a wide range of debates in the generic marketing literature, places them alongside the nuances of tourism, and thereby identifies unique challenges of branding in tourism destination contexts. Finally, a case study of USP based national tourism branding campaigns in the Caribbean is presented.

{"references": ["Hern\u00e1ndez, M.R., Talavera, A.S. & Parra L\u00f3pez, A. (2016). Effects of co-creation in a tourism destination brand image through twitter. Journal of Tourism, Heritage & Services Marketing, 2(2), 3\u201310. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.376341", "Nella, A. & Christou, A. (2016). Extending tourism marketing: Implications for targeting the senior tourists' segment. Journal of Tourism, Heritage & Services Marketing, 2(2), 36\u201342. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.376336"]}

SUBMITTED: AUG 2016, REVISION SUBMITTED: NOV 2016, ACCEPTED: DEC 2016, REFEREED ANONYMOUSLY, PUBLISHED ONLINE: 27 MARCH 2017