Marketing Tools and Tourist's Destination Image

Purpose of this study is to compare the destination image among tourists who take benefit of different marketing tools for their information gathering. Iran was chosen as the study destination and the potential foreign tourists who were willing to visit Iran and were somehow in search of information for choosing their travel destination, comprised the statistical population.The method employed for gathering data is survey. Findings reveal that internet, as the tourists’ most important tool for information collection, significantly affects the affective image of tourists, rendering a completely different affective image of destination among users and non-users of internet. Among various marketing tools, word of mouth, tourism magazines and brochures are the next most important arketing tools after internet.Despite the fact that internet is recognized as the most important marketing tool, guidebooks and brochures are identified to have the main impact on the destination image of Iran, after which comes word of mouth in the second place.