Perceptive readers of this blog will notice that I tend to draw on a lot of history - and especially military history - analogies. (So as you can imagine I am loving doing all the work on our culture and heritage blogs right now – and watching with great interest all the coverage for the Anzac Day Centenary) In my piece on tourism strategy and the lessons from World War I, I drew on Margaret Macmillan’s great book ‘The war that ended peace” to see the lessons for strategy in tourism businesses. As I noted then, there have been no shortages of … [Read more...]
Archives for April 2015
Like plaiting fog? Defining cultural and heritage tourism
In our previous blog on this topic, we noted the value of cultural tourism to the visitor economy. But just like tourism (the visitor economy anyone?), cultural tourism is an often confusing and complex industry that is quite difficult to describe. There is little agreement as to what constitutes cultural tourism. Moreover, because culture and heritage are inherently linked, it’s hard to separate “culture” and “heritage” in the mind of the consumer. So we thought it might be useful to summarise some of the issues and come up with a working … [Read more...]
How Culture and Heritage Tourism Boosts More Than A Visitor Economy
Culture and heritage tourism plays a critical role in building the visitor economy and goes even beyond that. A recent survey showed that over 50% of respondents polled agreed that history and culture are strong influences on their choice of holiday destination. Culture and heritage tourism is a fast-growing and high-yielding sector Statistics also indicate that culture and heritage tourism continues to grow as rapidly, especially in OECD and APEC regions. We estimate the direct global value of culture and heritage tourism to be well over … [Read more...]