All Roads Lead to… Cooperation: Cooperation Model for Cultural Heritage Routes With a Swiss Case Study

Abstract

Tourism – in spite of the recent crises – is one of the leading and most prosperous economical fields. Its effects on employment, national GDP, regional development and its social impacts are evident. Tourism can be an effective way of regional development, thematic routes, and especially (heritage-based) cultural routes are one of the tools and innovative possibilities for really underdeveloped and disadvantaged (larger or smaller) regions, too. The key factor of the successful tourism enterprises in this global market is innovation – though this is exactly the factor what is missing in the field, because of the dominance of small and medium size enterprises. In such a situation cooperation can be the solution for tourism innovations. Approaching cultural routes from another direction, i.e. tourism product development, we can reach to the same conclusion. Tourism products are complex sets of services, their planning and development have to be carried out along a very conscious, long-term conception, where the necessity of collaboration of the involved entrepreneurs and tourism organisations is also evident. In this study, I make an approach to cultural routes from both directions, and through a case study of Cultural Routes of Switzerland I present a new cooperation and product development model for heritage-based trails.