Digital Marketing of Bulgarian Natural Heritage for Tourism and Recreation

Abstract

The need for a closer and enhanced connection with nature, as the basis for human wellbeing, reinforces the importance of natural heritage governance, including wider and much improved access to information about nature-based tourism and recreation. This research seeks to reveal how Internet content can support the digital identification of nature sites and their branding as tourist destinations. To this end, it analyzes 20 exemplary websites, each known around the world, and highlights important current trends in the structuring and attractiveness of the information provided. Based on the devised benchmarking criteria, the study develops a benchmarking approach that improves digital “packaging” and marketing of natural heritage for the purposes of tourism, recreation, leisure, and sports, and then tests it in Bulgaria. The procedure includes the selection of 57 natural heritage sites and rating the content of their official websites. The results show an unsatisfactory level of representation of the heritage value of the Bulgarian NH and a severe depreciation of the provision of the necessary tourism and recreation information, in comparison to the selected global benchmark. Besides the outline of the most frequent gaps and shortcomings, the results provide managers with suggestions about the development of a “natural heritage” brand for tourism and recreation, which features amplification of site identity and messaging, plus enhancement of its visibility. The conclusions are applicable to a wide variety of geographical contexts and audiences in nature-based destination governance.

Digital Marketing in World Heritage for Tourism: Evidence From Vietnam

“…Digital marketing opens up new opportunities for tourist attractions, thereby bringing efficiency and sustainability to cultural heritage (Adie et al 2017). Therefore, to fully exploit the benefits of digital transformation, digital marketing stakeholders in the management of cultural heritage need to change their marketing thinking, and enhance the visitor's experience with attractions based on on modern new technologies towards co-creation of value in destinations (Ukko et al 2019;D'Andrea et al 2019;Dash and Chakraborty 2021b;Mitova et al 2021).…”

Aesthetic value protection and tourism development of the world natural heritage sites: a literature review and implications for the world heritage karst sites

“…Among them were 146 heritage sites meeting the aesthetic value criterion [ 16 ], which shows that most WNHSs with aesthetic value are high-quality tourism landscape resources. Whether it is the popularity of mass leisure travel and sightseeing tourism, or the promotion of ecotourism and sustainable tourism, as international brands with world-class natural beauty and important aesthetic value, these sites usually become preferred tourism purpose regions for tourists [ 17 ]. This means that outstanding aesthetic value is an important driver of tourism and recreational visits to natural areas, which can be used as a vital starting point for building the brand of WNHSs, help give full play to the brand effect of heritage sites, broaden the choice of tourists to visit WNHSs as tourism purposes, and then promote the transformation of aesthetic value into economic value, providing an economic basis for the conservation and management of most WNHSs [ 18 – 20 ], especially in developing countries [ 21 ].…”

Conservation and Sustainable Tourism Development of the Natural World Heritage Site Based on Aesthetic Value Identification: A Case Study of the Libo Karst

“…This means that most natural and mixed World Heritage sites are characterized by outstanding natural phenomena or rare natural beauty. The uniqueness, rarity, natural beauty, and aesthetic value of WNHSs often also have significant tourism value [25,26]. However, the assessment of aesthetic value is affected by many factors, and it is difficult to quantify this evaluation.…”