
Explore heritage tourism concepts from social sciences and management, examining authenticity, commodification, globalization, and heritage interpretation, while applying sustainable development and marketing strategies across ten modules.
Explore how cultural heritage and built patrimony, tangible and intangible elements, and living culture shape heritage tourism and cultural tourism in urban and rural contexts.
Explore how heritage demand shapes tourism by examining four cultural tourist types, motives, information sources, and key demographic and psychographic factors behind heritage experiences.
Explore how heritage supply drives tourism through tangible and intangible attractions, from museums and historic sites to living traditions, supported by services like lodging and transportation.
Explore how spatial perspective shapes heritage resources, from point, line, and area attractions to global, national, local, and personal scales, and understand impacts on planning and conservation.
Explore how heritage and tourism shape authenticity through criteria like aesthetics, uniqueness, integrity, workmanship, and local involvement. Examine how authenticity is perceived—objective and subjective—and the impact of distortions and narratives.
Explore how heritage conservation balances use and protection of the non-renewable built environment, showcasing preservation, renovation, restoration, and urban renewal as approaches, and addressing tourism and sustainability challenges.
Explore how heritage interpretation reveals the significance of places, artifacts, and events to diverse visitors, educating, engaging, and fostering care for conservation through holistic storytelling and planning.
Plan heritage destinations through integrated physical planning, land use, and zoning, prioritizing pedestrian access to protect heritage and boost tourism, guided by participatory, incremental, and sustainability-oriented collaboration.
Understand heritage tourism marketing to match supply with demand, using destination branding, geotourism, and authentic experiences to engage target markets and sustain communities.
Learn how heritage sites raise revenue and manage visitors through admissions, donations, retail, accommodation, interpretation, events, sponsorships, grants, and strategic access controls for sustainability.
This course offers a comprehensive critical examination and systematic evaluation of the dynamics of heritage and tourism development from both social sciences and management perspectives. It integrates both global and local perspectives in theorizing and managing heritage tourism. While focusing on reviewing and analyzing key academic concepts and debates, including authenticity, commodification, globalization, and heritage interpretation, the course also discusses and evaluates topical issues, such as sustainable development and marketing strategies. It theoretically locates heritage discourses in the analysis of heritage tourism development and management drawing on various perspectives, from tourism, heritage studies, sociology, anthropology, politics and geography to management and marketing studies.
The contents of the course include:
Cultural Heritage and Tourism
Consumption of Culture: Heritage Demand and Experiences
The Heritage Supply: Attractions and Services
Spatial Perspectives and Heritage Resources
Looking for Something Real: Heritage, Tourism and Elusive Authenticity
Protecting the Past for Today: Heritage Conservation and Tourism
Telling the Story: Interpreting the Past for Visitors
Planning Principles, Sustainability and Cultural Heritage Destinations
Marketing the Past for Today
Raising Revenue and Managing Visitors
This course can complement the Introduction to Heritage Interpretation course, particularly to enrich the Telling the Story: Interpreting the Pasts for Visitors, to increase the experience of heritage tourists.