Tourism studies and media studies both pose key issues about how we perceive the world. They raise acute questions about how we relate local knowledge and immediate experience to wider global processes, and both play a major role in creating our map of national and international cultures. The Media and the Tourist Imagination adopts a multidisciplinary approach to explore the interactions between tourism and media practices within a contemporary culture in which the consumption of images has become increasingly significant. The contributions are divided between those written from media studies awareness, concerned with the way the media imagine travel and tourism; those written from the point of view of the study of tourism, which consider how tourism practices are affected or inflected by the media; and those that attempt a direct comparison between the practices of tourism and the media. A number of common themes and concerns arise with particular emphasis upon the image as the object of consumption. While exploring the overlapping roles of tourism and the media, the collection also marks out their different approaches to the structuring and organizing of experience and the way in which this leads to a dynamic interchange between the two. Tourism and the media are discussed as separate processes through which identity is constructed in relation to space and place.