ABSTRACT
Two features drive tourism: attractions and access. If neither exists, then tourism does not exist. Attractions are demand generators that give the customer a reason to visit a destination, while access provides a means to reach the destination or the product within the destination. These two must work within a fine balance. Clearly, if demand generators do not exist, people will not visit, regardless of how strong the access is. No destination can succeed without a suitable breadth and depth of attractions, first to draw tourists and secondly to retain them for long periods. Likewise, if access is poor, people will have difficulty visiting even if latent demand is high. As a general rule of thumb, then, the potential appeal of the product must exceed the potential cost associated (in time, money, or effort) to access it. If costs are low, people will participate even if the assumed benefit is modest. But, if access costs are high and anticipated reward low, people will not visit. The critical feature within a cultural tourism context, therefore, is to create a sufficiently satisfying experience that is unique, exciting, and offers ‘one of a kind’ encounters that appeal to the target market to warrant the cost associated with reaching the attraction or destination. Failte Ireland (2012) talks about the need to create memorable moments to make customers feel valued, by providing the right products, right quality, right quantity, right time, and right place. Cultural tourists have been described as creative tourists (Lord 2002) where experiences must be provided to allow visitors to exercise their creativity. The Province of Ontario, Canada identifies the need for the establishment of creative destinations that offer unique participatory experiences (MTC 2009), while others are even more succinct, suggesting that experience is the product (Latvia 2006). Cataloguing an area’s cultural or heritage assets is an important first step in evaluating the cultural tourism potential of a destination (CTC 2004; Snowden 2008), just as cataloguing assets is the first step in CHM. Tangible and intangible cultural tourism assets, including local festivals (Felsenstein and Fleischer 2003), are thought to be ideally suited to be developed as tourism demand generators, for they encompass the unique features of a place that reflect its culture, history, or environment and, by their experiential nature, promote the rich tapestry of its cultural traditions, ethnic backgrounds, and landscapes (Copley and Robson 1996, Blackwell 1997). However, a cultural asset is not necessarily a cultural tourist attraction. An old building is an old building – nothing more or nothing less. It must be transformed into something than can be consumed before it can be considered as a product. However, the transformation process is challenging (EU 2009; Lade 2010), especially for smaller regional attractions or where consumers perceive its appeal as being boring or irrelevant. This part of the book examines cultural tourism products. This chapter looks at the general concept of products, examines the idea of products as tourist attractions, and
discusses the need to commodify and standardize product offering. The following chapters examine the processes involved in product evaluation and discuss some success factors. Before beginning this discussion, let us review some features of tourism. It is important to remember that destinations pursue tourism largely for the economic and flow-on social benefits. They do this by promoting their wide array of community assets as products to be experienced by the visitor. It is also important to remember that, apart from purpose-built attractions, the commercial sector plays a unique role as facilitator of experiences, rather than experience provider. In the past, these two elements (experiences and facilitator) operated in somewhat of a parasitic relationship: the facilitators relied on the experience providers to bring people to the region, exploited them and returned little. Increasingly, though, we are realizing that the convergence of tourism and cultural consumption is not coincidental. Rather, both sectors are involved in the co-creation and co-management of tourism products and, therefore, must function in a symbiotic manner for their mutual benefit. Cultural tourism represents the result of wider social changes where culture provision is becoming commercialized. In many ways, culture is being moulded successfully for tourist consumption through the development of such products and experiences as tourist arts, festivals and purpose-built theme parks targeted at tourists (Craik 1997).
