Cultural Thematic Tourism Itineraries: Mediators of Success

Chatting to Personalize and Plan Cultural Itineraries

In this paper, we present a system for the generation of cultural itineraries that exploits conversational agents to implicitly build formal user profiles. The key idea is that the preferences for user profiling are not obtained in a direct way, but acquired during a natural language conversation of the tourists with the system. When the user profile is ready, it becomes the input for the gener...

Cultural Mediators and Gatekeepers

The shaping influence of cultural mediators, in particular their legitimizing power, has led cultural scholars to coin them ‘tastemakers’, ‘gatekeepers’, ‘surrogate consumers’, ‘reputational entrepreneurs’, or even ‘co-producers’ of the work of art. Yet, in practice, mediators perform highly different and often distinct activities according to their particular contributions in the (increasingly...

Cultural tourism: challenges and strategies

Ethnic Tourism and Cultural Representation

The representation of minority culture is central to ethnic tourism development. However, only limited attention has been paid to cultural representation in ethnic attractions. This research examines representations of multiple ethnic cultures in the Yunnan Ethnic Folk Villages, China. The perspectives from four key groups of stakeholders— governments, park managers, employees and tourists—are ...

Spatiotemporal Thematic Maps for Sustainable Development of Heritage Site Tourism

UNESCO world heritage sites’ list is getting longer and longer. Many sites among them have attracted countless tourists each year. However, the lack of efficient systematic surveillance and monitoring methods let the evitable and inevitable impacts of tourism development happen unperceived. Our research focuses on an e-tourism system with heritage sites monitoring to explore the possibilities f...