Purpose
While the “creative turn” in everyday life has led to rapid development of creative tourism, not all forms of creative tourism use the same intensity of creative involvement. It is possible to distinguish between more passive and active involvement. In parallel, a “social turn” has led to popularity of forms of tourism, such as volunteer tourism, involving active participation. The purpose of this paper is to put forward ideas and present eclectic observations on active tourist participation around both the creative and social turns. Hence, it should be treated as a springboard and testing ground for these ideas and observations.
Design/methodology/approach
This study is based on theoretical conceptualisation with empirically derived supporting examples.
Findings
A new descriptor, “participatory experience tourism”, is advanced and argued to be preferable to reframing “creative tourism” to capture varied forms of experience involving active tourist participation. “Participatory experience tourism” is put forward as an extension of creative tourism and as an umbrella construct is further expanded upon to include notions of value addition.
Research limitations/implications
Structured empirical substantiation of the conceptual ideas in this paper is a future research need.
Originality/value
The paper provides an original theoretical construct to better account for forms of active tourist participation that have emerged from the creative and social turns that characterise contemporary society, and also heightens awareness of a key link in the experience value addition chain.
This article discusses the conditions required for meaningful and memorable tourist experiences to occur and for increasing the competitiveness of heritage tourism projects. The aim of this article is to examine whether the theoretical principles of experience creation (the principles of Pine and Gilmore, Timothy and Boyd, Tilden and Schouten) apply to the chosen three case studies (Museum of Broken Relationships, Zagreb; Krapina Neanderthal Museum; and Batana Eco-Museum, Rovinj), drawing on recent developments in creative tourism and the use of cultural/creative industries. The principles of the experience economy are related to heritage tourism so as to showcase its successful use in contemporary heritage displays.
Wellbeing has been researched in relation to social, wellness, rural, backpacker, senior, wildlife, transformational or transformative tourism or studies exist specifically focusing on wellbeing tourism. Surprisingly enough, there is a void of research focus on wellbeing in cultural tourism, although culture has been considered as having a substantial impact on wellbeing. The research uses the case study of the Museum of Broken Relationships (MBR) in Zagreb, Croatia, under the assumption that MBR experiences have a relevant influence on tourists’ subjective wellbeing. Subjective wellbeing was measured after the visitation using the Short Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (SWEMWBS) and a majority of the respondents experienced moderate to high wellbeing. Furthermore, the research aimed to investigate whether or not there is any difference between cultural and non-cultural tourists’ subjective wellbeing noted after the visitation to the Museum. The results showed that there was no substantial difference between cultural and non-cultural tourists’ subjective wellbeing.
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