Tourists as Story-Builders: Narrative Construction at a Heritage Museum

Although tourism scholarship supports the idea that the appreciation of a tourism experience depends on the availability and communication of stories, attention has been paid almost exclusively on marketers and tourism organizers as the main designers and promoters of narratives, ignoring the role of tourists themselves in this process. Using heritage museums as an empirical context, this research suggests that the success of a narrative presentation in tourism destinations also depends on the tourists' involvement, willingness, and ability to actively participate in the storytelling experience. In this sense, tourists act as story-builders whose main task is to construct a historical narrative based on the selection and integration of the available sources. The findings show that museum visitors go through a three-stage process during their effort to complete a heritage narrative and make sense of their tourism experience. This work sheds light on the coconstruction of tourism experiences and provides marketing direction for the successful narrative staging of museums and tourism places in general.