ABSTRACT
This paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach, in particular, drawing somewhat on the disparate fields of tourism management, consumer behavior, museum studies, leisure science, interpretative science and social cognition, and aims to provide evidence of cultural heritage tourism as an experiential mode of consumption and to explore ways in which the heritage experience is perceived as beneficial to its visitors. To specifically attend to the benefits which people derive from cultural heritage, a 'benefits-based' approach is adopted. In this way, heritage consumption is seen as involving valued imaginative, affective and emotional perspectives in the understanding of the period and place presented. The paper thereby seeks to address the human dimension of cultural heritage management through facilitating an understanding of the personal and emotive benefits, or value, attained by tourists visiting cultural heritage attractions, thereby moving beyond the attention to factual learning outputs from the context provided. In particular, the present study will present three distinct dimensions of beneficial experiences reported by visitors to three case study cultural heritage attractions in the U.K., that is, affective, reflective and cognitive dimensions. Each of these three psychological dimensions of the visitor experience will be explored in this paper and are offered here as leading to an end state of 'insightfulness.' This end state is proposed by the present author as a conceptualization of the intrinsic, experiential (and potentially longer lasting) outcomes attained by visitors to the three attractions. Although the conceptualization requires further empirical testing, it is proposed by the present author as representing attention to the more personal or human dimension of cultural heritage man-
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most added to their enjoyment. In this way, a three-point hierarchical rating was achieved (see Table 1), although this limited the analysis of the data to non-parametric tests (Blalock 1972) and principally to two sample chi-square analysis to test for contingency.
