ABSTRACT
Rural tourism has been emphasized as a highly prioritized sector by numerous countries due to its potential to retain and attract new inhabitants, create new jobs, and improve livelihoodsAU: Please note that per publisher requirement reference citation “UNWTO 2023” is not allowed in the abstract section. Hence, we have deleted the same in the abstract.. However, a significant challenge lies in the dual task of attracting tourists while preserving cultural heritage and mitigating the negative effects associated with tourism. Measuring and understanding the factors that determine a place’s attractiveness and the spatio-temporal behaviour of tourists in real-time can provide valuable insights into engaging tourists and identifying practices useful for preserving cultural heritage.
An important aspect of tourist engagement is its susceptibility to activities, encounters with various services, interactions with local communities, and landscape experiences. However, a majority of previous studies on tourist engagement have focused on post hoc survey-based data or online platforms. Despite the evident importance of geographical context in tourism, there remains a gap in tourism research regarding on-site real-time factors related to tourists’ spatiotemporal engagement and its impact on experienced value.
By integrating GPS trajectories and OpenStreetMap data with surveys, this chapter aims to explore how this method can capture tourists’ engagement and its effects on experienced value. By illustrating the implementation of this method in rural destinations, this chapter contributes to customer engagement research by exploring and depicting the nature of individuals’ spatiotemporal engagement in a destination and providing insights into how engagement influences value co-creation processes.
