'The river city'? Conflicts in the development of a tourism destination brand for Brisbane.

Tourism destinations are characterized by coexistence within the same geographical space of multiple private business and public sector organizations of varying scale and sophistication that offer a variety of target markets a range of services 'necessary to make the space maximally attractive to consumers of the tourism space' (Judd, 1995, p. 179). The complexity of the tourism destination as an amalgam of products, facilities and services that together comprise the travel experience (Buhalis, 2003) is enhanced by a lack of centralized control over destination marketing and development activities that characterizes commercial organizations (Laws et a1., 2002). While, generally, tourism destinations support a body that coordinates marketing and image-building activities, research shows that the major challenge to the ability of tourism destination to build positive destination brand equity (Konecnik and Gartner, 2007) is the achievement of a collaborative environment among the different stakeholders that all together contribute to the delivery of destination experience.