INTRODUCTION
Like all forms of tourism, heritage travel has its pros and cons, especially for local communities. That’s why it’s crucial to approach it responsibly, ensuring that our travels benefit both us and the places we visit.
To delve deeper into this topic, we interviewed Dr. Peter Robinson of Leeds Beckett University, an expert in the field. We discussed the definition of heritage tourism, its impact on local communities, the challenges of this particular form of tourism, and how we, as individual travelers, can practice it more responsibly.
Dr. Robinson also shared how heritage tourism can preserve physical heritage sites as well as intangible culture and folklore.
We appreciate Dr. Robinson’s taking the time to share his expertise with mindfulwayfarer.com.
Read on for his insights and practical tips on how to make your next trip a meaningful and sustainable exploration of our world’s rich heritage.
UNDERSTANDING HERITAGE TOURISM — Q & A WITH DR. PETER ROBINSON
Note: The following responses have been edited for brevity while preserving their original intent.
1. WHAT IS HERITAGE TOURISM?
Dr. Robinson, thank you for taking the time to speak with mindfulwayfarer.com. So first question: What is heritage tourism?
There’s lots of research around tourism that suggests that people are searching for authenticity. And heritage tourism is a big part of that, because people are looking to find an authentic past, and they go to things like reenactments or historic palaces to get a sense of what the past was like.
Heritage tourism generally describes the idea of historical sites repackaged as places for people to visit. Meaning a repackaged version of history, generally developed so that it celebrates the cultural heritage of an area.
And that brings with it lots of cultural nuances, because when repackaging history, it’s up to the judgement of those curating it to decide what is important and what is not important to share.
Take living history museums. If they were genuinely a replica of, say, Victorian England, they would be dirty and dangerous and people would be ill with cholera and typhoid.
So very often, there’s an authorized version of history that’s told to visitors, and then there’s a backstage history, which might have more cultural relevance and significance, which may not be shared with visitors.
For some people, the idea of heritage tourism as being repackaged history might come with connotations of it being inauthentic. Whereas I was thinking of heritage tourism as just when you go to a place because you’re interested in the culture, history and traditions.
Maybe you go to France, for example, because you love French food and really want to learn about it and experience it. So can you tell me if there is heritage tourism that’s more about curiosity than repackaging?
Actually, I think they’re the same thing. Repackaged might be a slightly oversimplistic term. But it is that idea that you can only share a certain amount of history with people, and therefore there has to be an element of commodification to make it accessible.
Let’s stick with France as an example.
If you go to the Palace of Versailles, you will engage with information about the history of the palace which has been selected by curators to be shared with visitors. And very often that narrative is layered.
For the first layer, the visitor may just walk around the palace, read the information that’s there, and that’s enough.
For the more inquisitive visitor, they’ll go on to the next layer, and they might purchase a guidebook.
The person who’s really interested in history might go further still and book a ‘behind the scenes’ tour.
And then there’s the person who will do their own research, and perhaps buy the more in-depth books that give a more thorough overview of the history of the site.
You mentioned this idea that the traveler is searching for authenticity, and yet on the other hand, that heritage sites are repackaged and curated. So how do the sites balance that?
I’ll give you two answers, if that’s okay.
The academic answer is, back in the 1990s I think, there was a piece of research done which said that with tourism, there are ‘front stage areas’ and ‘backstage areas’.
So take, for example, an African nation where tribal culture is still really important. And those tribes might offer displays of their culture for tourists who visit. The celebration they put on for the tourists is what is called ‘the front stage area’.
But the celebration that matters to the community happens away from tourists. And it will be subtly different.
Because one is curated for visitors to see and engage with, and the other is for a cultural heritage that’s important to the community.
So that’s one half of the answer. The other half is that there was a bit of work done in 1976 that talks about tourism and authenticity. And it said, ‘the holy grail for a tourist is to find authenticity’.
But the difficulty of finding authenticity is this: it doesn’t really exist.
Because people have to interpret historic sites; because curators have to choose what to share; and because, for the majority of historic sites, they aren’t preserved in aspic. They continue to change and evolve over time.
So in practical terms, the answer to finding authenticity is probably finding a version of heritage tourism that feels authentic to you.
2. BENEFITS AND DANGERS OF HERITAGE TOURISM
What are the most significant benefits of heritage tourism for local communities?
There are probably two or three.
Heritage tourism, if it’s popular, is really good for communities in terms of the economic benefits. People spend money in the local community while visiting heritage assets.
That means they’re supporting jobs, they’re supporting the local economy. If the visitors are focused on local produce and local food, you get all the benefits of a multiplier effect, where people spend money in the local economy, and it stays in the local economy.
Yet heritage tourism is not without its drawbacks. For example, perhaps you’ve seen all the news coverage in the UK of people objecting to the glorification of particular figures from the past because they made their money from the slave trade.
And that’s where you get into the questions of, ‘whose cultural heritage is this? And how do you tell the history to include all the different perspectives, so that everybody feels they have some connection to and ownership of our heritage?’
Otherwise, you get what’s called ‘dissonance’, where the heritage that is shared with tourists isn’t the heritage that the community identifies with.
Why is heritage tourism important for preserving cultural, historical, and natural/environmental sites?
Making heritage relevant to as many people as possible is the key to ensuring that the heritage is sustained and people continue to engage with it.
But of course, that is where organizations that own and manage historic sites have a real challenge. Because they need to create something that’s going to attract visitors, whilst also trying to make sure they don’t change the nature of the place that makes it special.
How can heritage tourism help preserve intangible cultural heritage, such as traditions and folklore?
I’ll use a UK example, because it’s front of mind.
There’s a museum near Birmingham called the Black Country Living Museum. It is essentially an old coal mining site. And over the last 50 years, various historic buildings have been moved from other parts of the West Midlands and rebuilt at the museum.
All of the actors who work there are dressed in costume and reinterpret particular jobs, roles or lives that the people of that era might have had.
And they talk about things like ‘why do people in Birmingham have their particular accent?’ And explain how it evolved because the coal mining industry was so loud, everybody had to shout.
So heritage tourism can be a really good way to provide people with access to traditional culture, folklore, food, dialect. Yes, it’s curated, but it can give it a good overview.
When we were talking about the benefits of heritage tourism, we touched a little bit on the dangers as well. Is there anything else you’d like to add about that?
The dangers of heritage tourism are it can be a poor interpretation that doesn’t reflect the cultural heritage of the area.
This isn’t a criticism, per se, but very often, you have volunteer organizations or small charities looking after important historic sites, who don’t have access to the curatorial or museum studies expertise to present those places in the best possible way. Or they don’t have the budget to spend lots of money.
So there’s always that balance of how much can you do with the funding you’ve got to create a relevant and meaningful experience?
Increasingly, particularly with Western European and US sites, there are conversations about colonial or neo-colonial heritage, and how that sits with how heritage is curated.
And there’s also the fact that not all visitors behave respectfully. I’m sure you’ve heard about people taking inappropriate selfies at Auschwitz. So tourists not thinking about how to engage appropriately with the sites they visit can be a problem.
3. CHALLENGES FACING HERITAGE TOURISM
What are the biggest challenges facing heritage tourism, and how can individual travelers help combat those challenges?
The biggest challenges facing heritage tourism depend on where the site falls on the spectrum of either having no money to look after it, or having plenty of money to look after it.
If there’s a complete lack of funding, and it’s difficult to get money to invest in that heritage, it falls into poorer and poorer condition.
At the other end of the spectrum, you have heritage which is so popular that it’s damaged by the sheer number of people visiting. The pyramids in Egypt are a good example of that.
4. RESPONSIBLE PRACTICES FOR INDIVIDUAL TRAVELERS
So what can the individual traveler do to help address those problems?
Slow tourism possibly has a part to play.
Slow tourism is a way of spending longer in a single place and really engaging the heritage and culture of that place.
So instead of trying to visit seven or eight different historic sites in the space of a week’s holiday, you spend that week in one location, really experiencing it.
Also, lots of sites now ask people to pre-book. Pre-booking is actually really good because it helps the site manage people. And the visitor has a better experience, because visit flow is managed more effectively.
If there’s peak and off-peak pricing, book the off-peak pricing. Visiting during an off-peak period takes pressure away from the busier times of year. And it also makes a valuable economic contribution at the time of year where a site is likely to have less visitors. So you get a better experience, and the money that you’re spending has a better impact.
And then the other thing is just behaving respectfully and understanding that while it may not be your cultural heritage, it’s other people’s cultural heritage. So thinking about how you behave and the photos you take and how you engage with the site is really important.
5. RESPECTING LOCAL CUSTOMS AND TRADITIONS
How can travelers respect local customs and traditions?
I suppose I’ve touched on that in some ways. Very often, there’ll be information available when you arrive that gives context to the place you’re visiting.
Engaging with that initial information, maybe even doing some research beforehand, is a good start.
Because sometimes that explains why people might be wearing different clothes, or why they might be engaging in things that aren’t actually for tourists.
6. PRACTICAL TIPS ON SUPPORTING LOCAL ECONOMIES
And this is something you’ve also touched on as well, but how can visitors support local economies when engaging in heritage travel? What are some practical tips?
If you’re visiting heritage areas, are you choosing to spend money in local shops rather than national chains? When you buy things in gift shops, are you trying to choose local products and things that are made by local producers?
Basically, by keeping that focus on ‘how do I spend my money in a way that will have the greatest impact on the local community? Which community groups can I support who are actively engaged in conserving and preserving heritage?’
7. PRIORITIZING RESPONSIBLE TOURISM PRACTICES
How can travelers choose tour operators or guides that prioritize responsible tourism practices, through the lens of heritage tourism?
That’s quite difficult. If you were asking me the question through the lens of eco-tourism, there’s lots of accreditation schemes out there that would give you an indication of whether a tour operator is trying to be more sustainable.
There aren’t really benchmarks in the same way for heritage tourism. Sometimes it’s about doing research and thinking about, ‘Where is this tour going to take me? Is it a local tour? Is it focused on the local area?’
I did a piece of work a few years ago with a small community group called the Inverclyde Tourist Group, and they welcome people off cruise ships at the Clyde terminal.
What was happening before was that everybody got off the cruise ship, they got onto one of 30-odd coaches that are parked outside, and they all headed to Glasgow or Edinburgh for the day. The community group said ‘let’s do something to keep them in the area’. So they came up with their own local tour. They take them to a small castle, take them to local cafes, and it gives them a much more intimate tour of the destination.
So travelers can look for groups that offer that sort of community-based, engaged, local, slow tourism-like experience.
But most of the [academic] research that’s been done suggests that tourists feel it’s the responsibility of operators and industry to make the changes so that they don’t feel bad about travel. There’s a real challenge in getting consumers to take responsibility for some of those ethical decisions that they might genuinely want to make.
Ironically, I bet if travellers make those ethical decisions, then the operators would have no other choice but to follow suit.
8. TECHNOLOGIES AND TOOLS
Next question: are there any specific technologies or tools that travellers can use to enhance their heritage tourism experience?
At the risk of plugging one particular solution, just because I know about it and I sit on the same board as a chap who developed it: There’s an app called Geotourist, and anyone can upload a tour of their local area onto it. As a visitor, you can go on Geotourist, look for tours of a particular area and download the ones that pique your interest.
I think that’s really interesting, because effectively, someone who lives there has come up with a tour of their local area, and now I can download it on my phone, follow the tour, listen to audio content about the places I’m looking at, and look at video content. I think that’s quite a nice way of getting people to engage differently with destinations, and get them a bit closer to some of that local cultural heritage that they’d miss out otherwise.
9. PROTECTING OFF THE BEATEN PATH HERITAGE SITES
How can visitors balance their desire to go places that are off the beaten path with the need to protect places that are fragile culturally and environmentally?
It depends what you mean by off the beaten path, I suppose.
But exploring sites that have fewer visitors and are less well-known, particularly when visiting those sites makes a contribution to the local economy, can be a good thing. And maybe should be encouraged.
Where off the beaten track becomes problematic is when everybody starts to visit that off the beaten track site, and it starts to suffer the effects of overtourism.
I think it comes down to choosing carefully and thinking about when to visit. Sites like Tripadvisor can be good to get insight into what people enjoyed, and what they found disappointing. And once you know that, you can think about ‘how do I mitigate that?’
So if people are saying ‘I’ll never go during the summer holidays again because it was crowded’, and that information leads you to go at a time of year when it’s quieter, you’ll probably have a better experience.
And travelling during quieter periods actually gives you a better opportunity to engage with heritage, because the people who are there to share that history with you will have more time.
10. SUSTAINABILITY AND HERITAGE TOURISM
What role does sustainability play in heritage tourism and how travelers can contribute to sustainable practices?
Sustainability is often incorrectly talked about as being purely about the environment. If you talk to anyone involved in heritage tourism, sustainability actually means financial sustainability and environmental sustainability and social sustainability. And travelers can contribute to that in a number of ways: By respecting signposts and information that says ‘these areas can’t be visited’ or ‘this area needs conservation’.
By making contributions to local conservation projects. So if you visit a site and there’s a sign that says ‘we’re raising money to restore this building’, maybe you make an additional contribution to that project.
They can also contribute to sustainable practices by doing some initial research and understanding the challenges these places face.
And thinking ‘how do I visit in a way that doesn’t have too much of a negative impact? Could I visit on my bike instead of going by car?
If I embraced the whole slow tourism thing, could I spend a whole week in a destination, instead of trying to fit in as many different places as I can?’
And all of that will also give you a more authentic experience.
About Dr. Peter Robinson
Dr. Peter Robinson is Head of Events, Tourism and Hospitality Management at Leeds Beckett University. Dr. Robinson’s expertise covers visitor attractions, transport operations, heritage and museums management, tourism landscapes, urban and rural regeneration and placemaking, business development and Cold War tourism.
He is an award-winning author and has published both academic books and peer-reviewed journals, as well as books covering a range of transport, tourism and landscape histories. He is also a features writer for a number of publications and has appeared on several television and radio programmes discussing the travel and tourism industry.
Dr. Robinson has owned businesses in photography, travel, ICT, waste management and publishing, and has delivered consultancy work for organisations in a several industry sectors worldwide. In 2021, he was Awarded the Victor Middleton Prize for Education and Scholarship by the Association for Tourism in Higher Education (ATHE).
He is a Fellow of the Tourism Management Institute and the Yorkshire and Humber representative, a Fellow of the Tourism Society, a Fellow of the Institute of Travel and Tourism, and a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He is Co-Chair of The Association for Tourism in Higher Education (ATHE), a Director of The Institute of Travel and Tourism and he represents ATHE on the Tourism Society Board. He is Chair of the Tourism Consultants Network and is also part of an ABTA Working Group on skills and qualifications. Dr. Robinson is regularly invited to speak at conferences about education policy, placemaking and heritage management.
He is Chair of a charity co-delivering a multi-million-pound regeneration project for the historic house and country park at Elvaston in Derbyshire and is the Education and Outreach Officer for the Airfield Research Group. He was formerly Vice-Chair of The Museum of Carpet.
