Links Between Tourists, Heritage, and Reasons for Visiting Heritage Sites

This paper aims to clarify heritage tourism by identifying and segmenting reasons for visiting heritage sites. In doing so it highlights the point that the links between a site's attributes and the tourists themselves are essential to understanding tourists’ motivations to visit heritage places. The sample was composed of English speaking international tourists leaving Israel through Ben-Gurion airport, who were sampled quasi-randomly. The research was implemented by the use of structured questionnaires using face-to-face interviews. Responses were grouped using an interpretability approach to exploratory factor analysis, and the results indicate that the reasons for visiting can be classified into three. These groups have been labeled ‘heritage experience’, ‘learning experience’ and ‘recreational experience’, and are linked to the tourists’ perception of the site in relation to their own heritage and their willingness to be exposed to an emotional experience. The results lead to a better understanding of reasons for visiting heritage places, and provide further insight into heritage tourism in general. The findings are also relevant to the operational management of spaces presenting history-related artifacts as well as to the marketing of these sites.