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Visitors to Heritage Sites: Motives and Involvement--A Model and Textual Analysis

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Journal of Travel Research

Published online on

Abstract

Any tourist evaluation of place is partly shaped by the tourist’s own culture, and this may be even more so when the site gazed upon is representative of a different culture and/or heritage. However, this article suggests that differences of evaluations may be overemphasized if the research concentrates solely on the variable of nationality. The physical characteristics of place, the interpretation offered, and possibly other features such as the level of crowding all have a role to play. The common experience of these factors by tourists of different nationalities may create a commonality of evaluation despite differences in tourists’ cultures. The study reported here of more than 200 respondents uses textual analysis to find similarities and differences between Australian, Chinese, German, and New Zealand visitors to a Maori cultural site in New Zealand.