The economics of cultural tourism: New topics and methods

Abstract

Introduction

In the last two decades, there has been a growing recognition of the role that cultural attractions play in characterizing tourist destinations and in shaping tourist experience (McKercher, 2002; Richards, 2002). From an economic perspective, cultural tourism has been widely studied, as a particular case of cultural consumption (Di Lascio et al., 2011; Kim et al., 2007), for the impact that cultural assets and activities have on tourism flows and quality (Herrero-Prieto and Gomez-Vega, 2017; Russo, 2002) as well as on local development processes in general (Girard and Nijkamp, 2009).

Yet, despite the growth in cultural tourism scholarship, several research questions remain open and there are a number of underexplored topics or unresolved issues in the empirical strategies adopted to address the topic. As highlighted by recent contributions (Noonan and Rizzo, 2017; Richards, 2018), there is still a loose definition of “cultural tourist.” This suggests that a deeper understanding of cultural tourists’ motivations, attitudes, and behavior is needed to better define the preferences associated to this specific type of travelers. While the marketing and sociological perspectives tended to identify different typologies of cultural tourists based on the depth and purposefulness of their cultural motivation, the economic literature has only rarely addressed empirically how the diversity of motivations or habits shape tourists’ consumption of cultural goods and services at the destination (Alderighi and Lorenzini, 2012; Brida et al., 2017). The use of big and transactional data on tourism consumption patterns can be useful in this respect, and they also offer novel insights into the complementarity/substitutability of cultural experiences with other leisure activities at tourism destinations.

At the same time, the expanding notion of cultural experience invites new economic research paths focusing on intangible cultural expressions, such as wine and gastronomy tourism (Hall et al., 2009; Hjalager and Richards, 2003), and developing new interpretative frameworks to account for the multidimensional forms of benefits in cultural tourism experiences. For example, the increasing attention in cultural economics for the effect of cultural participation on subjective well-being (Wheatley and Bickerton, 2017) is illustrative of a trend that should be followed also by the economics of cultural tourism.

Most of the economic literature on cultural tourism has focused on the demand side of the market so far, leaving several supply side and policy issues (provision and governance of cultural activities and attractions in the context of tourist destinations) rather understudied. For example, while a number of papers on overtourism at cultural destinations have appeared in the last years (i.e. Cheung and Li, 2019; Neuts and Nijkamp, 2012; Popp, 2012; Seraphin et al., 2018), economists have rarely entered into this debate and tried to provide theoretical and empirical perspectives into tourism policy solutions to cope with the problem.

Similarly, cultural tourism has been often linked to territorial branding and marketing in culture-led urban and regional policies (Servillo et al., 2012), but there is a very limited understanding of the political economic factors underlying such policies. Political economy and public choice can add new insights on how political and electoral cycles affect tourism policies and taxation at the local level and whether there is some form of spatial interdependence, possibly due to the strategic interaction between neighboring local governments and/or destination management organisations (DMO).

This special issue attempts to address some of these shortcomings by offering new insights in two main research areas: festivals and heritage as tourism attractions. Besides, two of the six articles refer to cultural tourism in emerging economies. Broadening the geographical coverage of the phenomenon is an ongoing trend, and its strengthening is desirable: It helps overcome the narrow-mindedness of a purely Eurocentric or, at best, Western vision of cultural tourists and cultural tourism destinations.

The contributions in this special issue: A comprehensive overlook

Three of the articles we present in this special issue focus on festivals, and three on heritage as a cultural attraction. The contributions mainly illustrate empirical findings (four out of six articles), a prevalence that characterizes cultural economics in general these days, while two, namely Frey and Briviba (“Revived originals - A proposal to deal with cultural overtourism”) and Snowball and Antrobus (“Festival value in multicultural contexts: City festivals in South Africa”), may be considered respectively as policy-oriented and methodological contributions. In particular, there are two empirical analyses on festival audiences (Montoro and Cuadrado, “Analyzing online research patterns of music festival tourists”; Zou et al., "Ethnic minority cultural festival experience: Vistior-environment fit, cultural contact and behavioral intention") and two on agents (tourists, residents) affected by the concentration/delocalization of heritage attractions (Aidie and Falk, “Residents' perception of cultural heritage in terms of job creation and overtourism in Europe” ; Brandano and Meleddu, "Together or Not? Spill-over effects of cultural goods displacement”). Snowball and Antrobus illustrate a new proposal for assessing the multifaceted value of cultural events, with special reference to festivals having a strong multicultural component, while Frey and Briviba propose replicas of heritage attractions as a solution to overtourism in heritage cities.

It is interesting to notice that, more or less directly, all three papers focusing on heritage deal with the issue of overtourism, an emerging topic in the years closely preceding the COVID-19 pandemic. The very definition of overtourism is debated, and especially whether it should be considered as an objective phenomenon or its subjective component is what most matters. Residents’ perceptions of tourism impacts and externalities are what Aidie and Falk consider as relevant, and they address the question of their determinants using the 2017 Flash Eurobarometer survey. Their analysis innovates in that they jointly consider respondents’ opinions about the positive impacts of tourism in terms of local economic growth and the negative externalities making tourism a threat to residents’ well-being. Their empirical evidence shows that the two perceptions often go together, and that it is more often so in cities and places near heritage sites, especially in some countries (Portugal, some Eastern European, and some Mediterranean countries). It is then not the case to ban tourists from heritage cities but to prioritize residents’ well-being, taking into account that cultural tourism affects it in multiple, contradictory ways.

Brandano and Meleddu consider the case of a specific cultural tourism attraction, the Giants of Mont’e Prama (a set of iconic Sardinian prehistoric statues), because of the peculiarity of its (controversial) display in two different locations: a city and a small village. Their question, investigated through the econometric analysis of survey data, is whether this arrangement may be beneficial in terms of cultural tourism flows: Is an agent’s visit to either exhibition associated to a higher number of visits to the other? The answer is yes, even after controlling for the fact that visiting either exhibition implies getting to know about the existence of a second one. This may be due to cultural addiction and/or cultivation of taste. It implies that the peculiar exhibition configuration determines two simultaneous and smaller cultural tourist stocks at a given time, yet not a diminished cultural experience (often its completion is only differed in time).

Frey and Briviba are among the first to explicitly discuss heritage replicas in economic terms, and they advocate their use as a way to divert tourism flows from congested cities/sites to nearby locations where copysites (Bernhard and Canestrini, 2019) should find place. In fact, they claim that this is now technically feasible and it would segment cultural tourists, because many of them would consider replicas and originals as substitutes. A cost–benefit analysis is necessary to check the consequences for heritage cities residents and businesses, but it is not given for granted that some categories would suffer, especially if replicas are located, as suggested, near the originals. The issue is perhaps even more interesting, given the recent and prospective boom of Chinese international tourists; in fact, Chinese culture has its own peculiar relationship with notions such as authenticity and originality (Oakes, 2006; Yousaf and Fan, 2020).

As for the contributions focusing on festivals, two out of three address the case of events whose cultural value and tourist attractiveness are intertwined with their purpose to promote minority cultures and/or audience diversity in a multicultural context. This is interesting, because it highlights a so far underrated aspect of cultural tourism, namely its potential in terms of transformative power of individual attitudes. Many cultural institutions have recently developed programs aimed at enhancing social cohesion and minority integration, but their target is generally the local audience. In fact, this does not exclude a spillover effect on other areas, provided cultural tourists bring back home what they have absorbed through the cultural programs offered. Interestingly, both empirical works use data coming from emerging economies: In particular, Zou, Meng, Li, and Pou consider the San Yue San (March 3) festival in Guangxi (South China), a feast celebrating the traditions and music of the Zhuang ethnic minority, and Snowball and Antrobus the Cape Town Carnival and the MACUFE festival taking place in Mangaung (South Africa). This tells a lot about how horizontal the issue of multicultural societies is across regions and nations.

Using a grounded theory approach to develop their hypotheses and the structural equation modeling methodology applied to survey data to verify them, Zou, Meng, Li, and Pou propose to test whether a high degree of cultural contact during a festival, mediated though visitor–environment fit proxies, is associated to a higher propensity to recommend it or to revisit. The answer is positive. Cultural contact is then here found to be an element contributing to cultural tourists’ well-being, and an important occasion for the co-creation of experiences with symbolic meanings, perhaps even allowing new insights into human understanding of the world.

Snowball and Antrobus relate about the methodology that the South African Cultural Observatory (SACO) has elaborated to assess the value of a festival for a community and offer two examples of its application. Of particular importance is the fact that SACO considers not just economic value but also social value and intrinsic (artistic) value, and in order to offer a comparable, overall value, it weights the three dimensions differently depending on the local needs and goals. While the social value mainly has to do with the supply side of festivals, hence the noneconomic impacts on the local community (social cohesion, enhancement of skills, pride), the assessment of both economic value and intrinsic value implies considering also attendees from other places (cultural tourists). The analysis of the socioeconomic impacts of cultural events is dealt with by well-established methods (Fredline et al., 2003; Tohmo, 2005), but assessing the intrinsic value is less common. SACO considers how the strength of the satisfaction for the event impacts quality of life (in the case of the MACUFE festival it is proxied by an index for the love for African music), which may be investigated through a survey on the (local and nonlocal) audience.

Montoro and Cuadrado consider festivals from a different perspective, that is, as a motivation of potential attendees for searching the Internet for information not just about the festivals themselves but also about their location (tourism facilities and attractions) and about travel-related items. Their contribution innovates both for the use of user-generated big data and for their adoption of an empirical strategy tailored to treat them (exponential random graph model specifications). We can consider contributions like this as a new starting point for cultural tourism studies: Digital footprints are particularly suitable to reveal robust patterns, and these qualify as the bricks of new models explaining motivations and behaviors. They are in fact huge in numbers and rich in interrelations. Supposing online searches reproduce mental hierarchies among topics, the authors find that (potential) festival attendees are pure cultural tourists (centrality of the nodes associated with searches focused on festivals) who often consider more festivals at a time. Spillovers emerge from the query on a cultural event to other search terms, including those on travel planning and leisure activities in the festival location.

The disruptive role of COVID-19 on the cultural tourism economic research agenda

The call for the current special issue was launched before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and no article in this issue directly addresses the impacts and uncertainties emerging in this novel scenario for the tourism industry and the cultural sector.

Amid unprecedented global travel restrictions and given the very high uncertainty on the end of the pandemic at the global level, the tourism industry, and in particular long-haul tourism, has been deeply affected by the pandemic. COVID-19 is not only posing a severe challenge to the economic sustainability of regions with a high tourist specialization. According to a growing number of observers (Gössling et al., 2020; Prideaux et al., 2020), it also questions the volume growth tourism model advocated till recently by several organizations and stakeholders in the tourism sector, in analogy with the ongoing climate crisis.

The arts and heritage sector has also been severely hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. According to UNESCO (2020), 90% of museums around the world have been temporarily closed for weeks or months during the emergency due to sanitary restriction measures and 10% of them have reported to be at risk of permanent closure. Even where cultural attractions have not stopped operating, they have incurred in large income losses (up to 75–80%), especially in touristic areas (NEMO, 2020), because the closure of borders and the frequent block of within country mobility have led to a sharp decrease in cultural tourism.

In this perspective, as emerging in the current academic debate on the wider field of tourism studies (Zenker and Kock, 2020), it is worth asking how the COVID-19 pandemic is going to affect the future research agenda in the economics of cultural tourism. While a full discussion is beyond the scope of this introduction to the special issue, we think it is useful to contribute here to this debate by suggesting few promising trajectories.

A first item in the new research agenda may be the shift of focus from cultural overtourism to the factors and conditions enhancing the resilience of the cultural heritage sector with respect to tourism flow volatility and demand shocks. In the past, with the demand for cultural heritage increasingly driven by cultural tourism, sustainability issues mainly concerned the impacts of growing visitors’ pressure and the policy and managerial solutions to cope with congestion. The COVID-19 crisis has instead unveiled the fragility of the sector in leveraging on tourism models driven by long-haul mobility.

In fact, the demand for cultural tourism was fueled, in the pre-COVID era, by the growing opportunities in international mobility. This led to an expansion of the profiles of cultural tourists and to a blurred distinction between the tourists whose consumption of tangible and intangible cultural products was an essential motivation, and those who instead experienced culture at the destination only for leisure.

The coronavirus pandemic is likely to lead to a substantial increase in the opportunity cost of traveling for many years to come, potentially leading to the emergence of two main models of cultural tourism. On one hand, there will be a rise in the consumption of cultural activities that are carried out outside one’s place of residence but in short-haul destinations. Cultural tourism will often be about day trips and excursions; in other words, a type of proximity tourism. On the one hand, long-haul cultural tourists will not disappear, but they will be few and characterized as either wealthy and/or highly motivated by cultural experiences at distant destinations. Top cultural attractions will become an elite and luxury good.

In this context, research on proximity tourism in cultural destinations is a promising path, and it may provide insights into the new sustainability conditions of cultural destinations (Romagosa, 2020). While the majority of cultural tourism scholarship has overlooked day trips and tourist practices within the intra-regional scale so far, now a few works have started addressing these issues (Bertacchini et al., 2019; Downward and Lumsdon, 2000; Jeuring and Diaz-Soria, 2017; Wynen, 2013a, 2013b), and a full understanding of this phenomenon is increasingly necessary in the post-COVID-19 scenario.

A second research issue relates to the long-term impacts that the COVID-19 crisis will have on festivals and cultural events as attractors of tourists. Over the years, events tourism has steadily grown as a niche in the tourism market (Getz, 2008). From an economic viewpoint, the boom of festivals and cultural events has been explained by a relative comparative advantage they display with respect to performing arts organizations with fixed venues. Festivals have lower production costs, offer more opportunities for artistic creativity, can provide more innovative formats to attract new groups of audiences and are less restricted by regulations than are fixed venues (Frey, 2019). Besides, they often take place in open spaces where attendants gather in very large numbers (hence larger revenues for the organizers); crowding is part of the experience. During and after the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the safety dimension is and is likely to stay fundamental for well-being, making crowding less attractive. This will put a severe strain on large events, and traditional venues will be revalued for their making it possible to restrict the number of attendants present at a given point in time.

A final research trajectory we deem as promising concerns how the increasing adoption of digital technologies triggered by the COVID-19 crisis will influence cultural tourism. Since the first months of the COVID-19 outbreak, with sudden closure of physical access to cultural attractions and restrictions to mobility for tourism purpose, both cultural organizations and destination management organizations have invested in digital infrastructure striving for online visibility and to maintain ties with their visitors (NEMO, 2020, Samaroudi et al., 2020).

It is therefore essential to understand how the increased supply of digital content accessible online or in virtual mode will generate substitution or synergic effects vis-à-vis traditional cultural tourism practices implying the travel and physical presence at the destination. If substitution effects prevail, this trend will possibly question the standard notion of cultural tourism and excursionism, leading to the emergence of virtual cultural tourism practices. These might be closer to digital cultural consumption (Navarrete, 2019).

If complementarity effects arise, a convergence between the virtual and physical experience of cultural attractions at destinations is possible (Gretzel et al., 2020). The crisis has triggered the adoption of technologies that facilitate the establishment of stronger digital interactions with prospective tourists and the profiling of tourists and visitors/audience through online reservation systems. This might enable cultural institutions and DMO to know their characteristics beforehand and therefore offer personalized services, possibly associating on-site and online (and/or virtual) experiences. These will in turn allow the tracking of behaviors, allowing further profiling, and enhancing the possibility to extend the (online) relationship after the visit. Interesting research questions will then concern the consequences of all this on both the supply side of the market (which types of cultural organizations are better equipped for this major leap forward) and the demand side (the impacts on cultural tourists’ learning experience and loyalty behavior).

Conclusions

The articles of this special issue provide new, interesting insights in some of the hot topics in the economics of cultural tourism and extend the coverage of the discipline to relatively unexplored geographical contexts. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, posterior to the call for papers, has added new items to the current research agenda in the field that we, the editors, have deemed necessary to mention to give a full picture—consistently with the very title of the special issue. This does not imply that the previously ongoing research trends should now be overlooked, and that the contributions here included are in any sense outdated. We thank our contributors to have proposed as interesting research items as assessing the impacts of festivals, considering the effect of multicultural experiences conveyed by cultural participation, analyzing the digital footprints of festivalgoers, and investigating overtourism (which will probably be back before we know at some cultural tourism destinations).

We also wish to express our sincere thanks to the Editor in Chief, Professor Albert Assaf, and the Editor, Professor Raffaele Scuderi, for the support in the process of producing this special issue, and the many anonymous reviewers for their valuable contributions.

Footnotes

Author biographies

Enrico Bertacchini is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics and Statistics “Cognetti de Martiis,” University of Torino, Italy. He holds a PhD in institutions, law, and economics. His main research interests include the economic analysis of cultural goods and markets, with a particular focus on museums and cultural heritage both from the organizational and from the consumer behavior perspective. He is currently member of the editorial board of Tourism Economics.

Chiara Dalle Nogare is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics and Management, University of Brescia (Italy). She holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics from University of Trento and PhD degrees in Economics from University of Pavia and University of Glasgow (UK). In 2018, she was country expert for Italy in the OECD research project: “Culture and local development: Maximising the impact.” Her main research interests include cultural economics, tourism economics, political economy and local government spending.

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