Researchers have noted that impression management is key to tourism crisis management planning and recovery (Ritchie et al., 2003:201); indeed, some have suggested that “crisis management is as much about dealing with human perceptions about the crisis as it is about physically resolving the crisis situation” (Heath 1998:26). Yet few studies have examined remedial strategies from a sociological perspective. The tourism literature is crowded with case studies describing responses to different types of tourism crises and disasters 1 . But these writings seldom explain how specific strategies manage—or fail to manage—external audiences’ 2 impressions of a destination’s image. When the effectiveness of strategies is evaluated (and it often is not) researchers rely on changes in indirect measures such as tourism arrivals, occupancy rates, or employment statistics for tourism employees—an approach that draws attention from how strategies work at the perceptual and affective level. This practice obviously assumes that strategies are effective, but the basis for this assumption remains implicit.