Cross Cultural Analysis Of Cruise Tourist Product Image Design Through The Analysis Of Costa Cruise Brochures

The close relationship between tourism and cross cultural communication has an important influence on the interaction between tourist and tourism agencies, especially if the service or the image of the tourism product are not meeting tourist expectations. These expectations can be influenced by the cultural background and system of values. Thus, while designing a tourist product, besides the market analysis, we should also consider the cultural factors.There are quite a lot researches on the relationship between service and cross cultural communication, therefore the aim of this paper is to analysis the designing and readjustment of the tourist product image according to Hofstadter’s Cultural Dimensions Theory. The objects of this research are Costa Cruise’s tourist brochures for the Italian and the Chinese market.After analyzing the content of the brochures, as the offer, the type of content, the words, the pictures and the structure of the pages, I obtained the result that during the designing and the readjustment of the tourist product image, were emerging the following cultural dimensions:"Masculinity/Feminist" and "Uncertainty Avoidance Index". These cultural dimensions where emerging on the level of precision of the information and on the kind of content that were emphasized in the brochures.The results of this research underline the importance of the cultural factors at the moment of designing or readjusting the tourist product image, as an additional factor to the market analysis.