Abstract: Image study is a popular theme in many disciplines because of the wide range of the perceptional objects. The image to a person, the image to a piece of art like a photograph, a picture or a novel and the image to a corporation or the image to an area like a city, a district, a country or a people, can all be studied academically in sociology, economics, literature, art, management, urban studies and tourism geography. However, geographical image studies both in and out of China have not yet attracted enough attentions to the geographical attributes and spatial process of the image object. In this paper, based on the idea of tourist destinations as a type of geographical areas, the author tries to discuss and deduce the spatial process and rules of how tourists percept destinations. The paper begins with a general introduction on principles of regions' hierarchy and spatial differentiation in geography. Based on the basic idea of space and region in geography, it is proposed that there exists a kind of 'areas ladder' constructed by areas hierarchy. With such a ladder in the mind, tourists can percept the geographic sites of all kinds of potential destinations. Such a ladder is named by the author as 'perceptional chain', which reflects the geographic context of regions in vertical hierarchy relationship, and has impacts on tourist image perception. Thereafter, three rules on the spatial characteristics of tourist destination image perception, namely, context rule, adjacent rule and resemble rule, can be deduced. As a result, image substitution in tourists' perception process can be easily understood. Context rule or context substitution can be used to explain that tourists tend to percept the higher destination in perceptional chain at first. That is to say, any area's image is cognized with the higher region as a background. Any one area can be understood only in the areas' context, and it is easier for people to know and remember the larger and higher areas in the ladder. Tourists tend to percept the images of lower regions as the images of higher regions if they don't know well these lower regions.As far as adjacent rule and resemble rule, the author notices that when tourists percept the regions in the same hierarchy or ladder, they tend to conceive these areas images as a unity if these areas are believed to be near in space or have some resemblance in natural or cultural elements. That is to say, one area's image can be conceived as another one if they are adjacent or resemble. Furthermore, distance between origin and destination, esp., cognition distance, as well as information possessed by tourists, has different and complex effects on image perception. A detailed discussion on these effects is also made in the paper. At the end part of the article, content perception of tourists to destinations image is analyzed and discussed on the basis of the conception of tourist destination typology and 'place identity' in geography. It is thought that tourists can get a more detailed and clearer image by the perception from the main destination types to the detailed place of destinations.