Cultural Realms - Rossitza Ohridska-Olson's blog about the business of cultural tourism

National Geographic Traveler Confirms Trends in Cultural Tourism

Rarely I like to say “I told you so…”, because it normally involves an advice I gave and somebody didn’t follow, in spite the money they paid to me to get this consultation. Or it is my husband for another reason – you know how it goes…

This time I am happy that Nat Geo Traveler confirms my forecast by choosing the “50 Tours of a Lifetime”. Here it is why (click on the picture for bigger size. Will open in a separate window):

As you can see from the table above, 32 out of the 50 featured trip are cultural tourism trips. From them, National Geographic Traveler classifies 22 as cultural, the rest are classified as cultural by the tour operator who organizes them. As I underlined, cultural and creative tourism, are recession resistant. In the 2009 edition of “50 Tours of a Lifetime”, National Geographic lists 22 trips. If we apply their criteria, there still be an increase of 100% over the last year.

It is normal for National Geographic, a global company, to list trips all around the world. Still, emerging destinations are predominant with the most exotic taking leading role, as I predicted in the 2010 Cultural Tourism Trends. As per the geography of these destinations, I “struck gold” with 10, out of 50 – not too bad, view the fact that 22 were named “cultural tourism destinations”.

Creative tourism take a significant place, view it is a new approach to cultural tourism. It is often mixed with other activities – volunteering, cultural travel, etc. Which proves another of my statements: “The consumer demand for authentic experiences and more “to do at the destinations” will pressure change not only the geographies of the cultural tourism, but also the relationships local community- visitors.” That is why many of the tours winning the prestigious label of “50 Tours of a Lifetime” offer interaction with local people, traditions and cultures, independently the main reason for travel: adventure, wildlife, active or volunteering tours.

Europe got it right by offering tours off of the bitten pad and big city cultural tourism. The tour choice shifted, as forecasted to niche sub-destinations:  Italy with Piedmont wine tours, which are more cultural experience then typical wine tasting, Pompeii with archaeological tours – another trend of niche tourism that I predicted, etc.

The most surprising was my comment on religious tourism: from the only one religious trip, among the 50 of National Geographic Traveler, was my certainty that Spain with its Camino de Santiago will take its deserved place among pilgrimage trips.

As per the business of cultural tourist, I predicted correctly that small, concierge type agencies would satisfy better the shifting cultural traveler profile towards personalized, responsible travel. Thirty-nine out of 50 trips are operated by travel companies that have in place sustainable, eco- or responsible travel policy. Thirty-three are operated by small travel agencies, offering customizable and personalized, individually designed trips with flexibility in travel dates.

P.S.

While preparing this blogpost, I went and read about all 50 tour operators | agencies, their tours, destinations, their policies, explored their websites and decided to name my favorites among the National Geographic choices:

Best cultural tourism agency: Wilderness Travel: for its rich choice of destinations, a wide array of experiences offered to travelers and user-friendly website, full of information and possibilities for customization of trips.

Best creative tourism agency: Cultural Crossroads (http://culturalcrossroads.com) for its highly customized tours and unique creative activities, in addition to incredible insider access to many places and people that other agencies cannot even dream.

Best niche tourism agency: Andante Travels, UK – for archaeological tourism. In addition to cover almost all possible interests in archaeology travel – from amateur lovers of archaeology to professional researchers, the website of the agency is the only one that offers a search engine that permits the user to search by historic period, in addition to destination, date and other normal travel search criteria. They are the only agency, which gives back directly to the archaeological sites, which can apply for a award, independently if the agency has a tour to the site or not.

Best personal discovery: Go Native America  - for promoting tribal cultural tourism, preserving the identity and authenticity of the Native Americans across North America, and in the same time providing exciting, educative and spiritual tours.

If you want compare yourself both documents, for the National Geographic Traveler “50 Tours of a Lifetime” click here and for Cultural realms “Cultural tourism in 2010: trends, destinations and business outlook” click here.

If you want to name your favorite tour operator | travel agency (and say why), please post a comment here, after the blog. Needless to say that if you work for some of these travel company, you cannot name it – it is logical, isn’t it?

Photo: Basket weaving lessons in Jordan
Courtesy of Carrie McDougall, with special permission for Cultural Realms

Creative Tourism: Destinations vs. Passions? Or both…

The ultimate form of cultural tourism – experiencing the creation of cultural values in the creative tourism – continues to be a big trend in destination marketing. The focus is on local arts, crafts, gastronomy, wine culture, and everything that a place can offer. Combined with the brand war between similar places to show their uniqueness, the main element of the tourism product for creative tourism is the local focus.

Is this the right approach? Yes and no.

The Destination Approach

The traveler interested in creative tourism will be appealed by the right destination promotion that offers a lot of possibilities for creative travel. They will choose a destination because of its overall appeal and the possibility to participate in the exiting experiences of creative tourism. In this sense, the destination approach should be focused on the local ambiance and uniqueness of this destination or city. That is true for 61% for the US cultural traveler and 28% of the European cultural traveler. On both side of the Atlantic the first most important reason to choose a destination is its overall appeal – its cultural environment. But it this enough?

The Passion Approach

From all cultural travelers in the USA, 23 % started with a certain type of travel experience in mind when planning their next trip. In Europe, from those whose main choice for travel was to experience culture, 38% cited the cultural heritage as main reason to choose a destination. This is in actuality the market for cultural and creative tourism: the main motivation behind the travel is to experience culture, not only to participate in cultural activities while traveling to a destination. In other words, this is the choice of the concrete passion of the individual: it is more important to make a tour of the Roman Empire heritage or the Frank Lloyd Write architecture, than to visit Italy or Chicago per se.

Understanding this trend, UNESCO created the Creative Cities Network.  Music lovers have choices from Italy to Spain, folk arts and crafts enthusiasts will be delighted to travel from Santa Fe to Aswan, Egypt. And while the gold seal of the UNESCO prestige worldwide provides these chosen destinations with enormous potential for marketing based on the UNESCO name only, other destinations should consider much more proactive measures in order to appeal to the cultural traveler, who pursue a passion.

Niche marketing vital for creative tourism destinations

Destinations tend to focus on marketing the overall product in order to appeal to larger groups of travelers. For big cities or clusters of monotypes of attractions (business, meetings, etc.) this works perfectly. Take for example Hamburg: the world city for industrial trade shows. No matter that Hamburg has a lot to offer to cultural travelers, the city is positioning itself as the number one MICE city in Europe and with brilliant success. Munich, on the other side, another MICE and super economic power city, have chosen the Oktoberfest, the most famous beer festival in the world, to attract tourism.

Are DMOs taking in account what niche they can appeal and deliver this message to the passionate travelers searching creative tourism experiences? Not always. They tend to present the uniqueness of a destination through a complex mix of “everything for everyone”. Event promotion for unique events, such as the Rose Festival in the Valley of the Thracian Kings, Bulgaria, Vienna New Year Concert or Milan Scala opera performances, is a very good approach, but is time limited to the duration of the event.

That is why destinations have to choose a typical characteristic, a mono-interest group of attractions appealing to one passion, one aspect of the city or micro-region/cluster to promote themselves to the cultural traveler. This positioning should fill the gap in the sentence: Our (destination, city, place) is the only one in the world where you can …. (learn how to bind your books with leather, paint on brown ceramics, craft your own cloisonné, etc.).

Peru, as a country, position itself as the only place to learn how to wave their incredible Inca style fabrics, and if you want to learn how to do it, this is the place to go. Chile, on the other side, where the same carpet weaving has the exactly same traditions, does not focus on Inca carpet weaving. Santa Fe is the destination par excellence for crafts related with earth-ware and American folk arts, and is the biggest success for creative tourism in North America. 

Destinations (from countries to small cities), should explore the possibility to brand, position and market themselves focused on these passions, without, of course, abandoning the overall appeal of the place, appealing to mass tourism. How they can do that?

Create

Determine which group of attractions, activities and infrastructure has the most unique potential to develop creative tourism product. For more information how to become a creative tourism destination, check up these articles. Increase market geography by choosing an uniquely global product. If your city, micro-region is too small, extend the region until finding the right unique product. Example: create a cultural landscape of all wine routes in your state (like Virginia is doing it) and package it together under one product: “Virginia wine making”. For certain interests, you will need bigger territory and several destinations under the same product (American Arts and Crafts Movement), for some destinations you will need only one product, like tile painting in Ybor, Florida.

Brand, position, promote, globalize

Create a group of tourism products (programs, projects, developments in the urban structure or the geographic micro-region) and brand it as “The only place where…”

Promote it globally to the niche markets. Maybe in Germany there are not enough potential travelers to go to Iowa City (UNESCO creative city for literature) to learn modern American literature, but for sure worldwide there are enough Kurt Vonnegut enthusiasts who will travel to the “Athens of the Midwest” to create a stable tourism income.

No matter what approach takes a DMO – a geographic or a specialization one, the most important is to show globally that this destination is THE place to create, experience and enjoy creative travel now, only here and to a very specific narrow niche demanding traveler. And, there is an enormous opportunity for DMOs and travel organizations (travel agencies, hotel owners, etc.) to capitalize on any of thee above approaches to destination marketing for creative tourism. In the USA, there is a gap of 67% between the desire to participate in creative activities (Mandala Research) and the real participation. Countries in emerging destinations, such as Chile, Vietnam, Cuba, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, and all Balkan countries, have unique treasures to offer and shape their destinations in an innovative way to serve the creative tourism. That combined with the fact that they are still in the list “to discover” gives them unique edge to promote creative tourism since the very beginning of destination development – a change to not miss now.

Research based on Mandala Research Report “The American Cultural Tourist”

and the European Traveler Profile Report (download .pdf).

Creative tourism: 5 important considerations for developing creative tourism destinations: 

Part One: Intro

Part Two: Location

Part Three: Human Capital and Attitude

Part Four: Target Markets, Strategies, Sustainability, Financing

Part Five: Advertising, Promotion and Authenticity

Cultural Tourism - the Facebook great experiment

A friend from Facebook.com. His wife. And a trip to discover cave churches, fortresses and Thracian tombs. People I didn't know in person. They had different plans - to visit the Ustra Fortress. The hot sun of South Bulgaria and the amazing discoveries we stumbled upon made us change plans. Of course, such spontaneous trips always have some disasters included -  waiting 2 hours to see a monastery which was nothing spectacular, walking hours to see a Thracian sanctuary without the time to reach it high in the mountains. Overall: an exhausting trip of cultural discoveries made out of enthusiasm of people who are only facebook friends. The economic results: more than 500 euros spent in places with low income and high unemployment rate. I hope this cultural tourism helped them. It helped us to transfer our friendship from the virtual space into the real cultural realms. For me, this experiment was great for 2 additional reasons, besides the new-forged friendship: re-confirm my conviction that not wild hidden places are as attractive as the UNESCO over-visited sites, and that cultural tourism is possible everywhere. And the biggest discovery: the Web 2.0. works for cultural tourism, it’s not an illusion. We transferred friendship, knowledge and pleasures from the screen to the real life, and back to the screen for other people to admire and visit these unknown treasures of little known cultures. See the great images on  Klearchos Guide to the Galaxy. This is what I call the great experiment of Facebook. I hope that from the 200 million of users of this social network many will follow our example and enrich their real life with real cultural trips.

Cultural Tourism and Emerging Destinations in the 2009 European Commission Report

A Gallup survey , commissioned by Directorate General Enterprise and Industry, was conducted among 27 000 European citizens with the purpose to collect their “views, details of holidays and travel in 2007 and 2008 and their plans regarding holidays in 2009”.

In spite of the financial crisis, 62% of the Europeans who traveled the last year, will travel in 2009, with 28% undecided and 19% who don’t plan to travel.  When it comes to the financing of their main holiday, 41% of the Europeans who plan to travel in 2009, say that they will not have any problems in finding the money, 38% say that they will have to save more money, but they still will take a vacation.

Culture, heritage and entertainment are the most important factors while choosing a destination: local environment (the overall attractiveness), the cultural heritage (24%) and entertainment (15%). Read more…

Country branding for cultural tourism

It seems easy to brand countries as destinations for cultural tourism, because the culture of each country is different. Also, the traveler who prefers this type of tourism, is most likely to look closer into these differences, versus the beach vacation tourist, who looks the weather report and the price tag. Is really easier to brand a country as an attractive destination for cultural tourism, especially in the emerging markets in Europe? See why I think that for some regions that is kind of a challenge, in spite that there is a light in the tunnel.

Managing no-destinations

Cultural heritage, folklore, crafts, nice and welcoming people are not enough for a place or region to become a cultural tourism destination. What is necessary and why I am so frustrated after my trip to Macedonia a week ago? Read about my experiences and about what this has to do to become a cultural tourism destination in the next 5 to 10 years.

Picture to the left: Staro Nagorichene church. One of the national monument of culture of Macedonia. No pictures allowed inside, but you cannot buy a brochure, or even a postcard. No place around to buy a water, coffee, or sourvenirs.

And, no signage to find the church, much less to mark it in a map of cultural attractions of the region.

Otherwise, the place is a gem. And it will be much more appealing after the govermnet of Macedonia invest 800,000 Euros in restauration and marketing.

Claiming History - I

There is an undeclared war going on between Geogria (the country) and Russia regarding South Ossetia. Trying to explain myself the conflict origins and decide who is right and who is wrong (see my post on Tower of Babel blog), I stumbled upon the official website of the Department of Tourism and Resorts in Georgia. It starts with “ Georgia. Europe started here.” In the frame of today’s killings between the two countries to control the Caucuses’ pass from North to South, this claim wasn’t the biggest crime.

But in the context of stealing everybody’s else history, at least it is not the best approach, if Georgia wants to enter in the EU and to be the “good guys” in the war against Russia, Ossetia and Abhazia. Besides that, is totally untrue. Europe starts from East to West in the Ural Mountains. In history, it started with Crete, Greece, Thrace and Macedonia. So how Georgia is the starting point of Europe is unclear.

And the biggest stupidity is that Georgia doesn’t need this exaggerated claim. From the McGovern book “Origins and Ancient History of Wine”  and his research, is clear that the other claim, “Georgia is unquestionably the birthplace of wine.” is totally correct. The ancient Colchis and Iberia in the antiquity, now the country is home of great nature (25% of the territory are nature parks and protected territories), great living culture (music, crafts, architecture) and of course, of incredible hospitality (current President and his generals excluded).

So, why Georgia, a place with so many tourist attractions and appeal, needs historically incorrect and exaggerated country branding? Read more...