Contemporary Cultural Heritage and Tourism: Development Issues and Emerging Trends

Cultural heritage is one of the most important and ubiquitous tourism resources in the world, and heritage tourism is one of the most salient forms of tourism today. Many places look to the built environment or other forms of heritage for their socio-economic development through tourism. The development implications of heritage tourism are well established in the research literature. This paper describes the role of cultural heritage in social and economic development and examines several emerging trends in the field of heritage tourism that have salient bearings on destination development. These include the heritage tourism market, heritagization of the everyday past, the value of authenticity, branding heritage places, the spread of cultural routes, intersections between heritage and other forms of tourism, and the heritagization of non-traditional heritage spaces.