Cultural tourism impacts and place meanings: focusing on the value of domestic tourism

Abstract

People develop emotional bonds and meanings with the places they live in and visit. This is commonly referred to as place attachment, sense of place, or neighbourhood or community attachment. To ensure that tourism results in positive, community-wide social impacts, tourism planning processes should align visitor experiences and local inhabitants' place meanings. In this chapter, I make a case for focusing on domestic tourism, in particular the visitation of tourism sites by people living nearby these places (dubbed 'local visitors'), to build back the tourism economy in a more sustainable way after the COVID-19 pandemic. During pandemic times, domestic cultural tourism could: (i) contribute to local visitors' place attachment and well-being; (ii) sustain at least part of the tourism economy; (iii) provide insights into how tourism should be organized so as to avoid future conflict between local inhabitants and external (international) visitors when the global tourism economy re-starts.