Heritage Tourism Definition

2.1 Introduction

This chapter discusses about the definition of heritage tourism. This will explain the benefits of heritage tourism. After that, the chapter will identify the attributes of heritage destinations, visitors’ characteristics, perception, and the relationship between the attributes of heritage destinations and visitors’ perception.

2.2 Heritage Tourism

Prentice (1993)stated that the term “heritage” as not only landscapes, natural history, buildings, artefacts, cultural traditions and the like that are passed down to one generation to another, but those among these that can be promoted as tourism products (as cited by Jin Huh, 2002).

There are several benefits heritage tourism offer to tourists and residents, as well as government.

Many researchers have studied heritage attributes. Hence, the researcher decided to choose several attribute of heritage tourism. Researches such as Andersen, Prentice and Guerin (1997) studied the cultural tourism of Denmark. There are several chosen attributes, such as historical buildings, museum, galleries, theatres, festivals and events, museum, famous people such as writers, shopping palaces food castles, sorts and old towns. They categorized the important attributes to be castles, gardens, museums, and historical buildings, when tourists made a decision to visit Denmark. Peleggi (1996) studied the relevance of Thailand’s heritage attractions to both international and domestic tourism, which includes the analysis of the state tourism agency’s promotion of heritage. This research provided several attributes, such as monuments, museums, and temples. Philipp (1993) examined that black-white racial difference in the perceived attractiveness of heritage tourism. The research found that white tourists were more interested in heritage destinations than black tourists. The following table illustrates the attributes of previous studies about heritage tourism and the attributes are identified to be used in this

According to Yavuz (1994), socioeconomic, demographic, and behavioural indicators are usually used to profile tourists by age, gender income, marital status, occupations, education or ethnic background in tourism research. This study supply visitors’ demographic and travel behaviour characteristics in order to explain the differences in visitors’ attributes and visitors’ perception. Hence, visitors’ demographic characteristics in the study include age, gender, total household incomes, and educational level. Additionally, visitors’ travel behaviour characteristics include group membership, past experience, length of stay, decision time taken to select a destination, and sources of information about the destination.

2.5 Visitors’ Perception

Visitors’ perception of a destination is important because it is one of the factors to attract visitors to a destination. According to Abd El Jalil (2010), the image perception of tourists is considered as important for general country image. The author also stated that brochures, tour operators and travel agencies also play significant roles in image creation process. Destination image are defined as environmental characteristics that have an impact on consumer behaviours and choices (Kamenidou et al.,