This paper argues that a gap exists between the marketing of shore excursions and cruise tourists’ expectations of ‘local flavor’ experiences. The paper first establishes that this discrepancy exists, then aims to refine the focus of marketing and promotion, and finally proposes strategies for improving cruise tourists’ satisfaction. Amsterdam, a city eager to attract more cruise tourists, is chosen as the case area to evaluate the alignment of marketing and passenger expectation. The study is based on an analysis of tours proposed by cruise companies, using a word frequency analysis of their narratives, and on structured interviews with 228 passengers. The result indicates that marketers should more effectively focus on and promote ‘local flavor’ experience. They could place a stronger emphasis on local identity by cooperating with more local partners and engaging tourists in product design.

The cultural attributes of architecture in touristic cities are vital to city image building, city branding, and rebranding, as well as generating more economic profits for sustainable urban development, and protecting cultural sustainability. However, many studies on this theme focus on the singularity of architecture referring to its stylistic or morphological definitions, lacking attention to visitors' cultural experiences in the architectures. Considering the importance of personal experience involved in cultural activities as a process of spatial narration through which architecture makes sense to visitors and generates cultural values, the aim of this paper is to reveal the respective correlations between different types of architecture regarding the cultural experience it imparts and the non-positive dimensions of the city image. This research builds a categorization system of three cultural types of architecture, and designs a questionnaire to collect tourists' personal opinions concerning architectures and the city image of Amsterdam's waterfront in order to calculate such correlations statistically. The results associate architectures with 'tourism-oriented', 'present/process-based', and 'mass' cultural types with non-positive dimensions of city image, which leads to further discussions of 'authenticity', 'identity', and 'mass culture', suggesting the significance of urban cultural policies and local communities in terms of city rebranding.