Many factors influence an individual s choice of holiday destination.
Holiday makers will set their needs and wants against the quality and range of products available in competing destination areas. They will build up an image of a destination defined as 'the sum of beliefs, ideas and impressions that a person has of a destination'. Where previous experience is lacking the image will be imprecise and shaped by perceptions rather than reality. When the Sea Empress, a tanker bringing oil to a refinery in Milford Haven, ran aground on 15 February 1996, the resulting spill of 72,000 tonnes of crude oil and the emotionally charged media images which followed brought both real and perceived changes to the Pembrokeshire holiday product. As a consequence, the process of holiday choice would have been subject to distortion with its scale and intensity being extremely difficult to gauge accurately simply because individual holidaymakers choices would not have been uniformly affected.