Cultural and heritage tourism: Whose agenda?

There continues to be a substantial gap between tourist-centred thinking about cultural and heritage tourism and the thinking that is characteristic of those who are from within the cultural and heritage industries. This paper asks the question 'whose agenda?' when considering cultural and heritage tourism. If two recent 'events' are any guide, the tourism industry, in all its guises, is not the most important stakeholder in the cultural and heritage tourism arena, despite the significance of 'culture' and 'heritage' as resources for tourism (at least, not in the narrow sense of cultural and heritage tourism as it pertains to museums and heritage sites). The two 'events' consist of the recent Congresses of the International Council of Museums (in Melbourne, 1998 and Barcelona, 2001) and the spate of charters that have emanated out of heritage bodies like ICOMOS, ICOM and the AHC. The paper analyses these as a way of articulating the need for a much better understanding, by the tourism industry, of the significant and complex issues facing museums and heritage site managers. It is apparent, from considering only these two 'windows' onto the cultural and heritage world, that the cultural and heritage tourism agenda is one that the tourism industry does not have a primary claim to.