Measuring Customer-based Brand Equity of Tourism Destinations: Just a Matter of Scale?

An increasing number of measurement scales has been developed in order to measure the customer-based brand equity of tourism destination (CBBETD) brands. However, there is a lack of theoretical development about the measurement of brand equity in such a context. A review of recent approaches shows that most contributions selectively focus on specific cases and tourists as stakeholders, while most articles demonstrate little methodological or conceptual reflexivity. Considering the variety and complexity of places, the paper argues that measuring place brand equity requires an inductive exploration of the construct's dimensionality for the specific place under consideration. Research can then focus on comparing multiple places associated with similar product or service offerings. Cross-place assessments should compare similar territorial entities, but include more destinations located in different spatial-cultural contexts. Furthermore, the inclusion of more stakeholders (e.g.,local residents) and more longitudinal comparisons are required to make the findings more meaningful.