The paralysis of global tourism caused by COVID-19 made it possible to conduct a unique and nearly real-time online survey to investigate adaptations and reactions to sudden severe leisure travel restrictions among residents in the Oslo metropolitan area of Norway during the 2020 Easter/spring holiday period. Stress relief, socialising, social bonds and discoveries of local recreation options were important home holiday experiences. Vacation challenges under lockdown included few opportunities for novelty and the chance of liminoid situations -reversal or bracketing of everyday routine existence. The enforced Easter staycation advanced reflections on impending leisure travel, indicating limited opportunities to boost future low-carbon near-home Easter holiday experiences. Path dependencies towards second homes and spatially stretched social obligations, as well as emphasis on freedom of movement, ostensibly constrain vacation travel habit discontinuities at this time of the year.

Destination image plays a key role in helping people decide where to travel and affects satisfaction, likelihood of return visits and word of mouth. While photography is not the only way of projecting and perceiving an image, 'a picture paints a thousand words'. The rise of social media and usergenerated content has made the image formation process more complex, and has reduced the extent of control that tourism suppliers can exert on the image they wish to project. It is thus necessary to further investigate whether tourists reproduce the commercialised image in what the literature calls the 'hermeneutic circle of representation' or capture and share their own impressions. This study constructs a categorisation scheme for conducting photography-based image analysis to compare images of two Norwegian destinations as projected by destination management organisations with those shared by Instagram users (perceived image). Results indicate that this circle of representation is not hermeneutic.

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