'A Landscape like a Painting?' - The Staging of Landscape in Hiking and Cycling Tourism

This article asks how landscape is presented by tour operators and consumed by tourists in the segment of hiking and cycling tourism. Tour operators rely on stereotypical images of landscape that were formed in literature, painting or film and reproduce these images in their marketing. These clichees are of great economic importance to tourism because they allow to position complex entities like regions or even countries as products by concentrating them to a single intellegible statement. While travelling, it shows that tourists not only want to see ideal landscapes but they want to see these landscapes in a certain way which John Urry accurately described as the tourist gaze. The desire for tourist gaze in turn is rooted in another stereotypical imagination that tourists want to come close in their self-staging: that of the traveller and discoverer which allows distinction from so called mass tourism.