Experiential marketing and local tourist development: a policy perspective

The focus of this paper is on the evolving context of tourist marketing and its power to promote peripheral regions as tourist destinations. WEB-GIS and virtual reality applications are discussed in this respect, as tools enabling an immersive tourist marketing paradigm, based on their potential to provide experiential information on local tourist assets. Experience gained from the development of such a platform for the island of Zakynthos ? Greece, integrating geographical information systems to the WEB and supporting tools for handling spatially defined real-time tourist information, addresses certain key policy directions that need to be dealt with in the regional context to support peripheral tourist destinations in reaping the benefits of the new marketing perspectives.