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J Cult Econ (2017) 41:95–107

DOI 10.1007/s10824-017-9300-6

EDITORIAL

Economics of cultural tourism: issues and perspectives

Douglas S. Noonan1 • Ilde Rizzo2

Received: 4 March 2017 / Accepted: 6 March 2017 / Published online: 18 March 2017
 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2017

Abstract The special issue aims at exploring, with an economic perspective, the
interconnections between cultural participation, in all its expressions, and tourism
organization and patterns with the purpose of understanding economic effects,
emerging trends and policy implications. The expanding notion of the cultural
consumption of tourists makes the definition of cultural tourism increasingly elu-
sive. Empirical investigations of the relationships between cultural participation and
cultural heritage and tourism offer interesting hints in many directions. This
introduction briefly overviews the premise of this special issue, the literature and the
several perspectives taken by the included articles. Aside from their cultural
topics—general, intangible or temporary—these essays all tackle some important
economic dimensions of tourism. We encourage cultural economists to invest more
in these fascinating areas as more than just intellectual tourists.

Keywords Cultural tourism  Cultural economics  Cultural consumption 


Sustainability  Nonmarket valuation  Heritage tourism

1 Premise

Choosing the title of this special issue was not an easy task. The special issue aims
at exploring, with an economic perspective, the interconnections between cultural
participation, in all its expressions, and tourism organization and patterns with the
purpose of understanding economic effects, emerging trends and policy implica-
tions. Whether the label ‘cultural tourism’ well represents these topics is a research

& Douglas S. Noonan


noonand@iupui.edu
1
School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA), Indiana University-Purdue University,
Indianapolis, IN, USA
2
Department of Economics and Business, University of Catania, Catania, Italy

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question in itself. In fact, cultural tourism is an attractive and very popular concept,
as it is demonstrated by the attention of international agencies and the existing rich
and variegated literature with marked interdisciplinary features; however, it is also a
rather vague and challenging one, with ambiguous empirical evidence. Any scholar
investigating in such a field faces unresolved definition and measurement issues and,
at the same time, promising and intriguing lines of research. Still, analysing together
culture, in all its tangible and intangible expressions, and tourism is worthwhile, and
cultural tourism seems to be a sufficiently comprehensive concept, notwithstanding
its elusiveness, which can be well sketched recalling the famous verses:
Mozart Cosı̀ fan tutte (1790), I.1
Don alfonso
È la fede delle femmine
come l’araba fenice:
che vi sia, ciascun lo dice;
dove sia, nessun lo sa.
(Da Ponte)
Woman’s constancy
Is like the Arabian Phoenix;
Everyone swears it exists,
But no one knows where.

2 ‘Elusive’ cultural tourist

Tourism is certainly a very important global industry because of its great


contribution to the economy.1 Indeed, tourists consume a variegated array of goods
and services, with linkages to virtually every industry in the economy. So, it is
usually considered as a crucial factor for local development, and great attention is
devoted to the measurement of its economic impact.2 At the same time, however,
the ‘cultural’ impact and the potential risks generated by unsustainable tourism
flows are also taken into account (Streeten 2006). Despite facing occasional shocks,
over the past six decades, the tourism sector has showed strength and resilience,
with a continuous expansion and diversification (UNWTO 2016).3
In qualitative terms, holidays, recreation and other forms of leisure motivated
about 53% of all international tourist arrivals in 2015, business and professional
purposes represented 14%, while 27% travelled for other reasons (e.g. visiting
friends and relatives, religious reasons and pilgrimages, health treatment).
International organizations do not make distinctions between cultural tourism,

1
According to World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) (2016), in 2015 travel and tourism accounted
for 3% of GDP, with a yearly rate of growth of 2.8%, higher than that of the global economy, and a
forecasted increasing trend.
2
For a survey of the literature on the economic impact of tourism, see Gasparino et al. (2008).
3
International tourist arrivals reached almost 1.2 billion in 2015 with a forecast of growing up to 1.8
billion by 2030; worldwide, an increasing number of destinations have opened up and arrivals in
emerging destinations expect to increase at twice the rate of those in advanced economies.

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J Cult Econ (2017) 41:95–107 97

and other touristic experiences4 and international statistics do not distinguish


between ‘leisure’ and culturally motivated tourists; however, they can be defined.
Notwithstanding the lack of systematic measures, OECD (2009) reports positive
estimates from various sources suggesting that cultural tourists, including all visitors
to cultural attractions regardless their motivation, account for 40% of international
tourists. However, it is difficult to distinguish between accidental cultural tourists
and tourists who consider culture as the main goal of their travel,5 and this bears
implications for the design of policies aimed at enhancing the role of culture as
driver of attractiveness and competitiveness of destinations. Perhaps reflecting the
blurred lines in official statistics, the scholarly literature continues to explore these
overlaps.
Indeed, cultural tourism is a longstanding phenomenon, and travellers making the
Grand Tour6 in the past can be considered the precursors of those who nowadays are
labelled as cultural tourists. However, as Bonet (2013, p. 387) argues ‘…it is
actually very difficult to define what cultural tourism is about. There are almost as
many definitions as there are tourists visiting cultural places’. Indeed, though there
is a wide agreement that cultural tourism implies the consumption of culture by
tourists, the meaning of ‘culture’ in relation to tourism is not straightforward. Such a
relationship has evolved from a narrow one, mainly based on immovable heritage,
to a broader one encompassing tangible and intangible elements as well as creative
activities (Richards 2011) and the search for cultural experiences based on the
lifestyles, the habits and the gastronomy of the visited places (OECD 2009).
This expanding notion of the cultural consumption of tourists makes the
definition of cultural tourism increasingly elusive. In the literature, various attempts
have been made to identify different typologies of cultural tourists, considering the
type of cultural attraction, and motivation and engagement, under the assumption
that all people visiting cultural attractions can be considered cultural tourists
(Richards 2003). Tracking technologies such as global positioning system (GPS) are
increasingly used to understand cultural consumption of tourists in a destination
(Shoval and McKercher 2017) or to investigate different profiles of cultural tourists,
combining the data on the actual behaviour of tourists with information on
motivation obtained through surveys (Guccio et al. 2017).
The empirical investigation of the relationship between cultural participation and
cultural heritage and tourism offers interesting hints in many directions. The
positive effects of culture on tourism flows are very often taken for granted, but
empirical evidence is rather ambiguous in such a respect. The debate in the journal
Tourism Management (Yang et al. 2009; Yang and Lin 2011; Cellini 2011) shows

4
According to ICOMOS (2002), cultural tourism cannot be regarded as a well-defined niche within the
wide range of tourism activities; in the same line, as reported by Richards (2003), WTO offers a wide
definition which does allow for a clear distinction of cultural tourism.
5
According to the Eurobarometer (2016), more than a quarter of Europeans (26%) mention culture
(religion, gastronomy, arts) as one of their main reasons for taking a holiday in 2015, with greater
percentages for older and more educated people.
6
The label Grand Tour was adopted for the first time by Richard Lassels in the Voyage or a Compleat
Journey Through Italy (1670), though the phenomenon of cultural and artistic travelling across Europe
had started in the second half of sixteenth century.

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that the effects of heritage, namely the ones included in the World Heritage List
(WHL), on attracting tourism flows are controversial. As examples: Patuelli et al.
(2013) find that, in Italy, heritage included in the WHL is a domestic tourism
attractor for a region, though spatial competition may reduce the positive effect; van
Loon et al. (2014) offer evidence of the positive effects of cultural heritage on the
recreationist’s destination choice for urban recreation trips; and Di Lascio et al.
(2011) suggest a positive, though very small, effect of art exhibitions on tourism
flows.
Other suggestions come from an opposite perspective, that is, the effect of
tourism flows on cultural attendance. Borowiecki and Castiglione (2014) provide
empirical results suggesting the existence of a strong relationship between tourism
flows and cultural participation in museums, theatres and concerts in Italy. Cellini
and Cuccia (2013) offer evidence of a positive effect of tourism on cultural
attendance in Italy. Zieba (2016) finds that foreign tourism flows have a significant
positive impact on opera, operetta and musical attendance in Austria. Brida et al.
(2016) outline that the motivations of tourists, as museum visitors, are not
necessarily cultural but recreational, perhaps better considered as associated with an
entertainment type of tourism. Another type of relationship between culture heritage
and tourism refers to the efficiency of tourism destination: Cuccia et al. (2016)
suggest that heritage included in the WHL affects negatively the efficiency of a
tourism destination as the WHL inscription raises expectations, which are not met
by an equivalent increase of tourism flows.
Summing up, tourism and culture are closely related, in one way or in another. In
order to catch the relevant economic implications of such a relationship, and to design
efficient policies, research is needed for a better understanding of motivations and
behaviours as well as rigorous methodological approaches, hence the premise for this
special issue’s collection of articles on the economics of cultural tourism.

3 The articles

To briefly overview the articles included in this special issue, several perspectives
might be taken. Cultural tourism often evokes special destinations known for the
predominantly cultural nature of their attractors—as opposed to natural (e.g.
ecotourism), recreational (e.g. gambling in Las Vegas or Monaco) or other values.
This special issue offers two classic examples of this kind of tourist destinations:
Amsterdam (Rouwendal and van Loon) and Italy (Guccio et al. 2017). Yet cultural
tourism often involves more than just museums, monuments, plazas and other
infrastructure that is itself historic or contains cultural artefacts. Cultural destinations
can involve the intangible and, indeed, the temporary. To that end, the special issue
features research on language tourism—immersing oneself in the intangible linguistic
resources of a location (Redondo-Carretero et al.)—and on a cultural festival—a
temporary exhibit of cultural assets or activities (Báez-Montenegro and Devesa-
Fernández, Srakar and Vecco). These articles help identify distinctly cultural elements
from other, more general and multidimensional attractors of tourists (i.e. a city or
region ‘as a whole’).

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J Cult Econ (2017) 41:95–107 99

Aside from their cultural topics—general, intangible or temporary—these essays


all tackle some important economic dimensions of tourism. On the front-end, there
is the interest in motivation and consumer tastes for tourism. Studies of motivation
(Báez-Montenegro and Devesa-Fernández, Redondo-Carretero et al.) explore this in
varying levels of detail and with different emphases. Both articles identify a
segment of cultural tourists motivated by professional reasons (in language or in the
film industry). This is quite distinct from tourists travelling for professional reasons
unrelated to cultural amenities (e.g. attending a conference) yet who nonetheless
undertake some cultural activities (as seen in the Rouwendal and van Loon and the
Guccio et al. articles). The next step beyond the motivation—actual attendance—
leads to some expenditures, and Rouwendal and van Loon examine the spending
habits of cultural tourists in Amsterdam. At a more macro level, Srakar and Vecco
then explore the economic impacts of cultural tourism associated with a major event
and distinction. Finally, no collection of studies on the economics of cultural
tourism would be complete without some inquiry into the supply side of the
system—and Guccio et al. examine the efficiency with which Italian regions are
able to produce cultural tourism experiences.

3.1 Travel purpose and expenditure patterns in city tourism: Evidence


from the Amsterdam Metropolitan area

This special issue begins with Jan Rouwendal and Ruben van Loon’s inquiry into
the expenditure patterns by tourists to Amsterdam. Yet this article is not merely a
description of spending patterns in a city that happens to have a lot of culture.
Rather, its central finding leverages a distinctly and uniquely cultural component of
Amsterdam’s tourism: as a destination, it juxtaposes classic cultural heritage (e.g.
famous museums, trademark canals) with a renowned quasi-legalized cannabis
scene and a famed red light district. Mixing traditional cultural heritage with more
contemporary, popular cultural themes offers an excellent opportunity to compare
economic activity across trip purposes. Their results outline both the spending
overlaps and the significant differences across tourists with different purposes. The
observed tourist expenditures blur the line between traditional heritage and more
popular culture but also reinforce the notion that there are separate types of cultural
tourism offerings with differentiated (yet wide) appeal. Better understanding how
the many dimensions of cultural amenities (e.g. nightlife, built heritage, cuisine,
language) serve as complements or substitutes can help destinations seeking to
optimize its portfolio of attractions. The Rouwendal and van Loon article highlights
the usefulness of examining diverse trip purposes for destinations.

3.2 On the role of cultural participation in tourism destination


performance: an assessment using robust conditional efficiency
approach

The supply side of the tourism sector is the focus of the article by Calogero Guccio,
Domenico Lisi, Marco Martorana and Anna Mignosa. These authors analyse the
efficiency of tourism destinations in Italy to see whether their performance is

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influenced by the destinations’ cultural participation. In short, they assess whether


regions’ cultural life can help extend tourists’ overnight stays and thus enhance the
regions’ economic returns from their tourism resources more generally. They
implement a robust, nonparametric approach to estimate regional efficiency, the first
of its kind applied in this context. That cultural life can spill over to enhance a
region’s overall tourism performance carries some obvious implications for
destination managers and those in the tourism sector. Yet Guccio et al. find more
than just another call for better coordination between the cultural and other
dimensions of regional tourism. They also raise important considerations about
congestion and sustainability in the tourism sector that cultural participation may be
particularly well positioned to help address.

3.3 Language tourism destinations: a case study of motivations, perceived


value and tourists’ expenditure

Language tourism is a rather novel topic and arguably the most distinctly ‘cultural’
of this special issue. Thus, the article by Marı́a Redondo-Carretero, Carmen
Camarero-Izquierdo, Ana Gutiérrez-Arranz and Javier Rodrı́guez-Pinto marks an
important initial foray into empirical economic research on language tourism
destinations. Their analysis of motivations and expenditures of language tourists in
Valladolid provides more than just insight into that specific empirical case; it helps
set the stage for future investigations of language tourism (and other cultural
tourism centred on intangible cultural resources). Very little is known in this field,
which makes the Redondo-Carretero et al. contribution all the more valuable. They
examine motivations from a ‘push/pull’ framework (see, e.g. Klenosky 2002) and
test whether expenditures differ accordingly. The connections—between motiva-
tions for picking particular destinations and expenditures or perceived value—are
particularly important in this context of intangible culture where cultural immersion
may imply some arbitrariness to the choice of specific destinations. The Redondo-
Carretero et al. article offers another example of cultural tourism spilling over into
other sectors of the economy while opening the door to future research to consider
culture in tourism where the cultural values themselves are not geographically
located or destination specific.

3.4 Motivation, satisfaction and loyalty in the case of a film festival:


differences between local and non-local participants

The next article examines how a temporary cultural amenity, a film festival,
provides value to visitors and locals alike. Andrea Báez-Montenegro and Marı́a
Devesa-Fernández’s detailed analysis of participant motivations highlights impor-
tant differences between residents and tourists and demonstrates how carefully
applying a structural model can help disentangle critical concepts like satisfaction
and loyalty. Notions of loyalty can be especially vital to sustaining cultural events
like film festivals, which makes this kind of motivation study valuable in its own
right. Yet their findings point to something even richer in the cultural tourism arena:
the differentiated roles of locals and tourists in supporting cultural events. In

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particular, their data analysis reveals two segments of the spectator market—those
attending the event for professional reasons and those with strong interests in the
cinema. For tourists at least, these two segments exhibit greater satisfaction and
loyalty, respectively. Identifying a loyal base of cinephile tourists for this film
festival, above and beyond those visiting for professional reasons, points to a
complementary role for tourism in supporting cultural amenities that may have
historically relied heavily on locals. The growing importance of that segment, and
their different interests and constraints, points to new challenges for future research
to help illuminate the interplay between the local and the tourist experiences with
cultural events.

3.5 Ex ante versus ex post: comparison of the effects of the European


Capital of Culture Maribor 2012 on tourism and employment

The Srakar and Vecco article provides a new evaluation of the European Capital of
Culture (ECoC) programme while engaging two related aspects of the cultural
economics and policy that remain controversial. The first and immediate contro-
versy arises in debates over the utility of economic impact analyses in general and in
arts and cultural applications in particular (see, e.g. Seaman 1987). A criticism of
economic impact analyses is often that their ex ante projections are biased or
particularly unreliable and tend to paint overly optimistic pictures of cultural
investments. Srakar and Vecco address this rather directly by using panel data
models to conduct an ex post verification of the 2012 ECoC Maribor. The second,
broader debate in cultural policy regards the use of ‘instrumental values’ (e.g.
economic growth, job creation) in justifying cultural programmes rather than
examining other, perhaps harder-to-measure or politically less salient, metrics.
Cultural tourism must confront this policy debate as well. Nonetheless, the ex post
verification for the ECoC Maribor is an important and, at least in this context,
original application with interesting results in its own right. These results (far less
job creation than the ex ante economic impact analysis showed) demonstrate the
value of ex post analyses of cultural programmes and can inform future debates over
the use of economic impact analyses and other economic indicators more broadly.

4 What is missing

This special issue benefits from a strong interest by scholars, leading to over two
dozen quality manuscripts submitted on fairly short notice. Unfortunately, that
means that many excellent pieces of scholarship will need to be published
elsewhere. As guest editors, we had the unenviable task of selecting just a handful of
pieces to represent here. In addition to the overall quality of each article’s research,
we applied several criteria to help shape a special issue that we hope both has broad
appeal and makes meaningful contributions to the subject. We sought to represent a
diverse mix of cultural attractions in a diversity of locations. The five articles in this
issue thus cover a few specific cultural offerings (film festivals, Spanish language or
quasi-legalized cannabis) and, more general, regional cultural amenities. They also

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represent traditional Western European cultural destinations (in Italy, Holland and
Spain) as well as relative newcomers to the literature (Slovenia, Chile). The articles
here also span national to local in their scope, using data that range from individual
level to regional or more macroeconomic indicators. Importantly, the selected
studies also demonstrate a breadth of methodologies, including regression analyses
of tourist expenditures, dynamic panel data analysis, conditional efficiency frontier
estimation and structural equation models of motivations and loyalty.
We also sought a mix of articles in terms of their emphasis in innovating either
theory or empirical methodology. In the end, as readers will see, little theoretical
advancement is represented in this special issue. This entirely owes to the
overwhelming emphasis on empirical applications in the pool of submissions, which
we see as an interesting statement about the state of field in its own right. We also
had a special interest in studies of novel or emerging areas in cultural tourism, and
some of those are indeed represented here (drug tourism, language tourism, film
festivals). More interesting and ongoing work in new areas—such as online
‘crowdsourcing’, cultural conventions or ‘cons’—should be encouraged. Also
missing are studies of international trade flows related to cultural tourism, on
sustainability issues in general and with respect to developing countries and
nonmarket valuation (either stated- or revealed-preference) applications.
Nonmarket valuation studies have featured prominently in the cultural economics
literature over the past decade or two. The 2003 special issue of this journal on the
topic, in particular contingent valuation applied to arts and culture, highlighted a
sizeable extant literature (Noonan 2003) as well as some tourism-related applica-
tions like Carson et al. (2002) and Snowball and Antrobus (2002). In the years that
followed, many studies using contingent valuation methodology (CVM) and choice
experiments have been conducted and published in the cultural economics field, and
more than a few applications related to tourist sites (e.g. Bedate et al. 2009; Báez
and Herrero 2012; Herrero et al. 2012; Ambrecht 2014). In addition, the literature
has spread to other nonmarket valuation methodologies like hedonic pricing
methodology (e.g. Noonan and Krupka 2011; Moro et al. 2013) and travel cost
methodology (Poor and Smith 2004; Melstrom 2014; Voltaire et al. 2016). Wright
and Eppink (2016) recently offer a meta-analysis based on evaluation studies of
tangible and intangible heritage and identify common drivers of value.
Accordingly, we expected to see a strong representation of valuation studies in
response to the call for this special issue. In fact, several stated preference studies
were submitted, so this kind of research is indeed being conducted in the cultural
tourism arena. They were omitted from this special issue not because of the vocal,
outside critics of the approach (e.g. Diamond and Hausman 1994; Hausman 2012).
Rather, they simply were not the strongest examples of economics research related
to cultural tourism. We see this as much as a compliment to the strength of the other
articles contained in this special as it is an observation that some nonmarket
valuation studies prove sufficiently easy to conduct (i.e. the barriers to entry are
low) that the level of rigour and quality for typical studies may fall short. This is not
unlike some of the criticism levied at economic impact studies (e.g. Seaman 1987;
Frey 2005), where convenience of methodological tools and relevance of
application often outweigh the needs for rigorous implementation and novel

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scientific contributions. The economic impact study included in this special issue
(Srakar and Vecco), for instance, stands out for its application of a (much-maligned)
methodology in a particularly novel way that clearly articulates a contribution to the
economic literature. Clearly, it is possible to advance the field and state of
knowledge substantially even in controversial areas. The prevalence of studies using
a particular methodology (e.g. CVM, economic impact analysis, DEA) merely
raises the bar in terms of rigour and novelty that is needed to stand out from the
crowd.
That said, there may be special reason to be concerned about the state of the
nonmarket valuation research in cultural economics—perhaps especially as applied
to tourism. The criticisms recently levied in prominent venues like Journal of
Economic Perspectives (see Hausman 2012) raise the concerns that (a) key
audiences remain unconvinced of the fundamental validity of this suite of empirical
tools and (b) specific weaknesses associated with the methodologies lack strong and
vibrant economic literatures to address them. The former concern implies a
challenge to stated preference researchers to better articulate their economic
fundamentals and make their case for genuine contributions. In that regard, we
would recommend stronger references to the experimental economics literature
(which appears to suffer less from these criticisms) and to the more formal elements
of the theory and experimental designs underpinning these methods. The latter
concern offers a road map to future stated preference researchers to better connect
their work to these ongoing and emerging challenges in the literature. There is a
sizeable literature that has already addressed many of these criticisms (Haab et al.
2013), and it falls to future researchers to build on that foundation.
In the cultural economics area, the challenge should also be to identify the
specifically cultural dimensions of those research questions. Yet another estimate of
willingness-to-pay and how income or education affects it, for instance, offers little
contribution to the broader cultural economics field, even if the good being valued is
obviously cultural. This applied element of the challenge to make the research more
fundamentally cultural points to the value in developing research designs and
applications that lend insight into some particularly cultural component of
preferences or preference elicitation. This might be inquiries into how culture
manifests in values that individuals express, how culture affects how we elicit those
values, or something else. The cultural economics literature to date has been largely
caught up in estimating values of cultural resources (goods, artefacts, experiences).
The next step may require moving beyond valuing yet-another-cultural-good and
better connecting the valuation exercise with something distinctly and theoretically
cultural in terms of values or methodology. The notion of cultural capital (Throsby
1999), in fact, brings about both economic value and cultural values; while the
former is measurable in financial terms, the latter is multidimensional and lacks an
agreed unit of account. In the standard economic approach, it is assumed that all
values can ultimately be expressed in monetary terms and that cultural values are
recognized as determinants of economic value, rather than values in themselves.
The open and challenging question is whether the value of cultural resources can be
expressed as a combination of two separate—economic and cultural—components.
Throsby and Zednik (2014) find some evidence for the hypothesis that for works of

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arts: the cultural value component, while related to economic value, is not subsumed
by it. However, the assessment of cultural value is still in its infancy.
In this sense, the challenge resembles the broader challenge identified in this
essay about ‘cultural tourism’ more generally. At its heart, the distinction between
cultural tourism and tourism generally may be a false distinction. The research
agenda for valuation research in the cultural economics arena needs to better
articulate its contributions to the academic literature, in particular how it relates to
the cultural economics field. Similarly, cultural tourism economics research should
strive for something more than economics that can apply to tourism topics. Of
course, tourism management is a field that can inform this work, but so can the
considerable cultural economics literature. Classic ideas like Baumol’s cost disease,
superstar attractions (Frey 1998), cultural capital and sustainability (e.g. Throsby
1995; Caserta and Russo 2002), cultural distance (e.g. Ginsburgh 2005) and taste
formation (Castiglione and Infante 2016)—and the dynamic interdependence with
supplier choices (Blaug 2001)—are all ripe for application to tourism topics.

5 What is next

Moving in the direction of developing more distinctly cultural economic theories of


tourism presents an important challenge to the field. This special issue contains a
host of articles that take some first steps in that direction. Guccio et al. and
Rouwendal and van Loon describe some important spillovers between cultural
offerings and other tourist activities and thus raise questions about the portfolio of
attractions supplied and how that affects demand. Redondo-Carretero et al.
introduce another layer of complexity, where the cultural appeal (language tourism)
is not specific to the destination. The taste heterogeneity among locals and tourists
identified by Báez-Montenegro and Devesa-Fernández, and the questionable
positive impacts of ECoC Maribor described by Srakar and Vecco point to issues
of sustainability and justifications for public subsidies that are general to cultural
tourism.
What is next for the field in terms of research on the economics of cultural
tourism remains to be seen, of course. The challenge of continuing to develop and
refine theories (and applications) of the cultural aspects of the economics of tourism
looms large. This special issue demonstrates promising signs and hints at several
key areas for future inquiry. This includes a continued development of the literature
about motivation and trip purpose. Market segmentation and how the local portfolio
of cultural offerings gets consumed by those of varying trip purposes or motivations
represent core issues for suppliers and regional planners as well as those studying
cultural participation more broadly. There are niche markets in cultural tourism, and
what it means to travel significant distances for symbolic goods that relate to
personal identity should reveal a great deal to discerning economists. That a
substantial portion of those trips occur as groups, introducing collection choice and
shared experience (Sable and Kling 2001) into the tourist experience, invites even
more inquiry. Similarly, cultural tourism’s relationship with scale and joint
consumption remains a fruitful area for research, especially when congestion costs

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matter (Maddison and Foster 2003, Caserta and Russo 2002) or when the crowd
itself is part of the attraction (such as in Rio’s Carnaval).
Shifting attention somewhat to the supply side, the articles in this special issue
direct our attention to the supply of cultural offerings to tourists. How that portfolio
is determined and provided, and what kinds of trade-offs are made—including
balancing local and tourist markets—call for more positive and normative analysis.
The role of public subsidies in cultural production may differ when the consumers
are predominantly foreign. In addition, three of the cultural attractions addressed by
the articles in this issue are inherently intangible (language) or temporary (a film
festival, a European Capital of Culture designation). Cultural tourism is clearly
about more than built heritage, immovable installations and museums, or other
permanent attractions. Yet even the temporary confronts issues of sustainability in
the context of cultural tourism, as festivals may return and investments may outlive
or extend beyond the event itself. Cultural economists may have much to contribute
to our understanding these intangible and temporary tourist attractions.
Finally, other major societal trends may have significant implications for cultural
tourism that are only now unfolding. New, digital technologies (e.g. crowdsourcing
of recommendations, digital substitutes and complements to consumption) and
ageing populations may affect how we participate in cultural tourism. Peacock
(2006) has argued that technological changes, rather than having a substitution
effect on real cultural attendance, are likely to create a ‘globalization of culture’,
operating as advertisement and, thus, stimulating tourism flows. The rise populism
in areas around the world and other policy shifts, such as opening (or closing) of
borders, may have special impact for cultural tourism. Likewise, changes in
economic prosperity and emerging markets (e.g. China) might offer opportunities to
learn more about demand for and supply of cultural tourism around the globe. In
addition, the emergence and growth of destinations attracting tourists with ‘popular
culture’ (e.g. shopping meccas, red light districts, major sports events, blockbuster
TV and film locations) promise fertile grounds for cultural economists. We
encourage cultural economists to invest in these fascinating areas as more than just
intellectual tourists.

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