Is booking behaviour influencing the promotion of tourist regions?

Just as in 2011 I  did a curious observation at the ITB 2012. I noticed that the European countries basically presented their country and tourist regions, with some information about accommodations. But looking at overseas destinations it is interesting to see that it is mainly accommodations that present themselves, grouped per country or holiday region. General tourist information about these countries or regions is hardly available. This difference raises the question why this promotion strategy is different. At least it made me think of the investigations of the INTERREG IIIb project ‘To Learn’ in 2005-2008. Please click here for an article of the Leeuwarder Courant highlighting that topic. During the expert interviews that were held in the Netherlands it was noted that the booking behaviour seemed to change. It was said that traditionally the older consumers first chose a country or region for their holidays, which was followed by the search for a suitable accommodation within that country or region. This is in contradiction with the younger generation that starts with finding an accommodation suiting their needs, whereas the country or region comes at the second place. Although no further evidence for this trend was searched for, this would mean that to attract the younger generation destinations have to market themselves in a different way: not by promoting countries or regions primarily at fairs or websites, such as the European countries do at the ITB, but by promoting attractive accommodations, such as the overseas destinations do.