Industrial Heritage Attractions: Types and Tourists

Abstract

Heritage tourism has become an important sector in the tourism industry. In fact, interest in heritage tourism among the American public increased 16% from 1991 to 1995. In spite of this surge in demand for heritage tourism little is known about tourists' visitation to “types” of heritage attractions and if their travel behavior characteristics are related to their patterns of visitation. This study examined both issues in the context of industrial heritage tourism. The results indicated that tourists were visiting “types” of industrial heritage attractions. In addition, there was a relationship between the type of trip they were on, the number of people in their travel party, when they made their decision to visit, and the total number of trips they had taken in the last 12 months and the “type” of industrial heritage attraction they visited.     

Exploring cultural tourist towns: Does authenticity matter?

This study applies various conceptualisations of authenticity to explore to what extent tourists appreciate the authenticity of cultural tourist towns. Using the visitor-employed photography (VEP) method, this study collected visitor-employed data in two cultural tourist towns in Shanghai, China to analyse tourists' personal enjoyable aesthetic experience. Results show that tourists were not overly concerned about objective authenticity as long as they had a positive and enjoyable experience, and that some tourists experienced and favoured existential and postmodern authenticity in the tourist towns. Results highlight the importance of designing entertainment activities and iconic attractions in a strip shape to engage tourists and enhance their enjoyment. Overall, results suggest that sophisticated design characterised by interaction of four townscape factors – nature setting, emotional design, spatial configuration, and commercialised elements – can shape tourists' enjoyable authentic experience. Findings have implications for tourism and tourist attraction operators in their planning, design, conservation, and promotional efforts.     

Exploring tourists' perceptions of tourism impacts

Unlike how tourism is viewed by residents, little is known about how tourists feel about tourism in the destination. Nevertheless, studies have shown that tourists' emotional bonds with the destination positively affect their perceptions of and reactions to tourism in the destination. Such emotional bonds often vary based on tourists' previous experience in the destination. Thus, this study explored how tourists' emotional solidarity with residents influences their perceptions of tourism and how first-timers and repeat tourists differ in their views. To this end, 404 responses from South Korean sport tourists were analyzed. Though differences were not evident between first-timers and repeat tourists in their emotional solidarity or attitudes toward tourism, a positive relationship was confirmed between emotional solidarity and perceptions of tourism. The findings suggest that attitudes toward tourism is no longer a construct exclusive to residents and destination managers should also consider tourists' views.     

Thanks for the memories: Exploring city tourism experiences via social media reviews

This study uses online reviews to explore memorable tourism experiences of tourists visiting different city attractions. Seeking to identify a collection of themes and concepts reflecting tourists' memorable experiences during their attraction visits, this study reveals the most shared tourism memories in cognitive-emotive-behavioral themes. By developing a matrix that categorizes tourist city attractions based on an ideographic approach, the study also argues that there are different types of tourist memorable experiences at different types of attractions (i.e., human-marker, nature-sight and human-sight tourist attractions). The findings extend previous understanding of the research in tourism experience and attractions by analyzing 156,986 TripAdvisor tourist reviews of the top ten most popular tourist attractions in London. This study also provides recommendations for destination management organizations and various city tourism stakeholders to plan, market and manage city tourism products and services.     

Impacts of COVID-19 on tourists' destination preferences: Evidence from China

Using data of online ticket sales for attractions in the seven provinces of South Central China, this study focuses on the impact of COVID-19 on tourists' destination preferences after the end of lockdown. Empirical results reveal that tourists' destination preferences have changed significantly, which holds under a number of robustness checks. Specifically, we find that tourists avoid traveling to destinations with more confirmed cases of COVID-19 relative to their places of origin, especially Hubei Province, and prefer destinations close to home, especially local attractions. The empirical findings have significant implications for managers and policymakers in tourism and we provide potential mechanisms for these findings based on signaling, risk perception, and prospect theory.     

Tourists' and tourism suppliers' perceptions toward crisis management on tsunami

This study describes tourists' perceptions toward the importance of safety measures across tourists who stay at different types of accommodation; compares the pre and post analysis of such safety measures during normal time and six months after the disaster and identify safety measures that contribute the most to the sense of beach safety. This study uses a survey, interviews, and observation. The target population was inbound tourists traveling to Thai beaches. It was found that respondents who participated in the survey six months after the March 2011 Japanese tsunami placed more importance on almost all tsunami safety measures than those who did the survey six years after the Indian Ocean tsunami. Guests at guest houses, placed the highest importance on all safety measures, whereas guests at upscale hotels, placed the lowest importance. Moreover, perceptions of beach safety were dependent on the availability of a tsunami evacuation system and a crisis management plan.     

Value orientations and heritage tourism management at Petra Archaeological Park,Jordan

Involving different stakeholders, including tourists, in managing tourism and understanding their value orientations are key concepts to achieve sustainability of heritage tourism. However, tourists have been mostly ignored in managing heritage attractions. Given the importance of values in heritage tourism management, and the different tourists' preferences toward management actions, this article aims to explore the value orientations of different types of tourists at Petra Archaeological Park, and how these values influence their management actions preferences. Majority of the tourists were preservation value oriented, and they preferred direct management actions rather than indirect actions. Results indicated that whenever the level of the importance of heritage tourism increases in tourists' trip motivations, tourists tend to be more preservation value oriented and support direct management actions.     

Residents' Perceptions Toward the “Chinese Tourists' Wave” in Hong Kong: An Exploratory Study

Mainland China experienced an extraordinary progress in its economy in the past two decades which directly stimulates more outbound travels. Considering the geographical proximity and political ties between Hong Kong and Mainland China, the share of inbound tourists to Hong Kong has been, and will continuously be, largely occupied by Mainland Chinese tourists on an uprising basis. The phenomenon of the “Chinese tourists' wave”, operationalizing as the influx of tourists from Mainland China, has brought tremendous change on Hong Kong's tourism industry, economy and local community. It is, thus, of necessity to understand the perceptions and response toward this phenomenon from local residents' perspective as they are the stakeholders of local tourism. Drawing on the findings from three focus group interviews with 18 Hong Kong residents, three conventional dimensions, namely “Economic”, “Social-cultural” and “Environmental” were identified and discussed to demonstrate the local residents' perceptions toward the impact of “Chinese tourists' wave” phenomenon. Generally, residents tend to recognize the positive economic impacts as well as negative social–cultural and environmental impacts generated from this tourism phenomenon. The recommendations suggested in this study also serve as a reference for tourism authorities concerned to redress the existing problems.     

Tourist movement patterns understanding from the perspective of travel party size using mobile tracking data: A case study of Xi'an,China

Travel party size has been shown to affect tourists' behavior. However, due to a previous lack of big-data analytical techniques, there remains limited research on the effect of party size on tourist movements from a large-scale perspective. This paper presents an empirical case study on the understanding of tourist movement patterns from the perspective of party size using mobile tracking data in Xi'an, China. A Fine-grained Travel Party Partition (FTPP) method is proposed to automatically distinguish accompanied tourists from a dataset of all tourists in Xi'an. After aggregating travel parties according to the size, tourist movement patterns are compared across different party sizes from demographic, spatial and temporal aspects. We further discuss how the obtained insights can help the stakeholders in travel package improvement, connectivity enhancement among attractions, attraction planning and management, and personalized next-attraction recommendation.     

Keep it real: Assessing destination image congruence and its impact on tourist experience evaluations

Inaccurate promotional information about tourist destinations may result in tourists' negative evaluations. This study proposes a new approach to measure the congruence between projected and received images of a destination's attractions. Based on online textual data, this study investigates how image congruence influences tourists' evaluations of their destination experiences. Using promotional messages and reviews of attractions in Hainan, China obtained from a leading Chinese online travel agency (Ctrip) and a three-way fixed-effects regression model, this study demonstrates that image congruence positively affects tourists' appraisal of their destination experiences. External crises (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic), the readability of promotional messages, and tourists' expertise moderate this relationship, reducing the positive impact of image congruence on tourist experience evaluation. This study bridges theoretical and empirical gaps in destination image (in)congruence research, informing tourism marketing agencies of effective promotional strategies in different contexts.     

To buy or not to buy? The effect of time scarcity and travel experience on tourists' impulse buying

By its very nature, tourism is a temporary experience. But how time scarcity makes an impact on tourists' impulse buying is still unclear. By looking into the role played by travel experience and overconfidence, this study explores the mechanism behind the influence of time scarcity on tourist impulse buying of local products through an integrated series of experiments together with a post-trip survey. The results show that the interaction between time scarcity and travel experience affects impulse buying. For tourists with rich travel experience, time scarcity increases their impulse buying, while for tourists with less travel experience, time scarcity decreases it. Overconfidence plays a mediating role in the effect of time scarcity and travel experience on tourists' impulse buying.     

An application of network analysis on tourist attractions: The case of Xinjiang,China

This study constitutes a novel application of network analysis to explore the underlying mechanisms of tourist attraction network informed by tourist flows. Using survey data collected from a sample of 456 tourists visiting Xinjiang, China, the study applies the Quadratic Assignment Procedure (QAP) to test the relationships between region proximity, grade proximity, and tenure proximity, and the attraction network determined by tourists' free choice movements. Results show that while region proximity and tenure proximity among major attractions in a destination were positively related to attraction network, grade proximity was negatively related to the attraction network, indicating that same grade attractions were mostly competing with one another for tourists. The study contributes to the methodological development of social network analysis in tourism and advances understanding of demand-driven network relationships among tourist attractions in a destination. Destination management implications are discussed.     

A taxonomy of creative tourists in creative tourism

This study aims to characterize creative tourists and their perceptions of creative experiences at tourism sites. Creative tourists are active co-creators of their experiences; hence, they should be treated as a heterogeneous group of co-producers who have subjective opinions and feelings toward their creative experiences. The existing literature suggests that a creative experience is constructed by ‘inner reflections’, which include not only ‘consciousness/awareness’, ‘needs/motivations’ and ‘creativity’, but also ‘outer interactions’ which refer to ‘environment’, ‘people’ and ‘activity’ (Tan, Kung, & Luh, 2013). However, how a particular mix of factors interact and define an individual's perceptions of a creative experience may vary among different types of creative tourists. Q methodology was used to reveal the tourists' inherent subjectivity of creative experiences with regard to the constructions of personal meaning. Five distinct groups of creative tourists were identified: novelty-seekers, knowledge and skills learners, those who are aware of their travel partners' growth, those who are aware of green issues, and the relax and leisure type. Each consists of a different composition of factors which can provide new insights into how different creative tourists construct their personal creative experiences at these sites.     

‘Through the magic of authentic reproduction’: tourists’ perceptions of authenticity in a pioneer village

As a concept, authenticity is widely debated across tourism studies and theoretically approached from numerous perspectives. This mixed-method qualitative study utilizes a constructivist framework for examining tourists' motivations, perceptions of authenticity and landscape experience in a self-proclaimed ‘authentic reproduction’ pioneer community. Spring Mill Pioneer Village is the original location of the former village; however, as a heritage landscape, it is composed of restorations, reproductions, and replicas of nineteenth-century structures. Thus, it is an appropriate case study for the examination of tourists' perceptions of authenticity. Moreover, tourists note authenticity as a motivating factor in their decision to visit the village, yet they define the concept in numerous ways. As a result, tourists’ pioneer community experience is governed by more than their perceptions of authenticity, but engages the village landscape, active atmosphere and their own imaginations.     

Sustaining the Physical and Social Dimensions of Wilderness Tourism: The Perceptual Approach to Wilderness Management in New Zealand

The dynamics of the tourism industry are well illustrated by the case of New Zealand's tourism development over the last decade. The number of international tourists visiting New Zealand has doubled in the last ten years to approximately 1.5 million annual visitors. Associated with this growth has been a significant shift in patterns of tourist demand. No longer do most tourists simply comply with established tourist routes linking the high profile scenic attractions. Rather tourists have demonstrated a preference for more independent and dispersed patterns of travel, including an increase in demand for settings that offer subjective qualities of wilderness experience. This poses a complex but intriguing management challenge. If wilderness recreation involves pristine natural settings in the complete absence of facility development and visitor management, then these resources are more prone to degradation so than any other natural tourism resources. This paper suggests that an understanding of tourist perceptions of wilderness is crucial to the management of wilderness tourism, and considers the application of the perceptual approach to wilderness tourism as a means of sustaining wilderness values while promoting the satisfaction of visitor expectations.     

The destination competitiveness of Kinmen's tourism industry: exploring the interrelationships between tourist perceptions,service performance,customer satisfaction and sustainable tourism

Based upon an empirical investigation, the study draws upon the responses of 1623 tourists in Kinmen to explore the notion of destination competitiveness and how it is related to customer satisfaction with tourists’ perceptions, service performance and destination competitiveness. It also considers the question of destination competitiveness and sustainable tourism development. Variables such as tourists’ pre-visit perceptions, post-visit satisfaction toward destination attractions and resources, willingness to recommend and revisit, and competitiveness with foreign destinations are tested. The results of the study suggest that there is no correlation between tourists’ overall satisfaction and destination competitiveness. Implications of the study outcome illustrate that a destination's unique tourism characteristics can be the most important variables for destination competitiveness. In Kinmen's case, battlefields, historic relics, beautiful scenery and travel security gave it a competitive edge, despite high prices. In addition, developing the destination's brand image was found to be critical for tourism marketers and authorities in the context of increasingly global tourism competition.     

Exploring the influence of tourists’ happiness on revisit intention in the context of Traditional Chinese Medicine cultural tourism

Based on how tourists interpret the destination experience and on attachment theory, this study investigates the influencing mechanism of tourists' happiness on revisit intention for traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) cultural tourism destinations. Three tourist samples confirm the three dimensions of tourists' happiness: positive emotions, engagement, and meaning. Two surveys were conducted to test the direct and indirect influence of tourists' happiness on revisit intention and the moderating role of tourists' health consciousness. The results show that tourists' happiness promotes memorable tourism experience and place attachment, in turn stimulating revisit intention. The results also support health consciousness as a significant moderator between happiness, place attachment, and revisit intention. The findings enrich theoretical understanding of tourists’ happiness and provide marketing and management advice for TCM cultural tourism destinations.     

A spectrum of indigenous tourism experiences as revealed through means-end chain analysis

Ethnic culture is the special attraction of indigenous tourism, and exotic culture plays different roles in tourists' experiences, reflecting distinctive meanings and values. This study examines the complexity and hierarchical nature of tourists’ experiences at indigenous sites and deconstructs experience patterns using a means-end chain approach. Fifty-eight in-depth interviews were conducted and used to construct hierarchical value maps. Three sets of indigenous tourism experiences are identified: enjoying nature and a simple lifestyle, participating in indigenous activities, and experiencing ethnic culture. Two value-led gains are derived: happiness and enrichment. An experience spectrum is proposed from self-oriented, through self and others, to others-oriented, reflecting different orientations of pursuits that are expressed through experiencing indigenous tourism in various ways.     

Exploring religious tourist experiences in Jerusalem: The intersection of Abrahamic religions

By considering the importance of religious tourism for travel and the tourism industry, this study aims to identify religious tourists' experiences in Jerusalem, as one of the most important holy cities. By a survey, 848 data were collected from the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious tourists. Results showed that religious tourism experience was a multi-faceted construct, which consists of engaging mentally, discovering new things, interacting & belonging, connecting spiritually & emotionally, and relaxing & finding peace dimensions. By using these dimensions, perceived experience differences of tourists were examined depending on religion. Moreover, religious tourism experience was identified to significantly affect overall tourist satisfaction with Jerusalem. The study concluded with discussion of the findings and their implications.