Creative tourism: activating cultural resources and engaging creative travellers (2021) (original) (raw)

Creative Tourism: New Opportunities for Destinations Worldwide?

Presentation at the World Travel Market Conference on ‘Creative Tourism: All that you need to know about this growing sector’, November 3rd 2015. Creative tourism is a relatively new niche that is being taken up by destinations around the world. The basic reason for this is the growing dissatisfaction with traditional models of tourism development, and the realisation that the creativity of both hosts and tourists is an important potential resource for the sustainable development of tourism. This brief presentation reviews the important features of creative tourism and how it is changing people’s lives.

Challenges of creative tourism

2014

This chapter reviews the development of creative tourism over the past decade and identifies major trends and practices both from a production and consumption perspective. In particular, this review highlights the shift from tangible to intangible cultural and creative resources as the basis of cultural and creative tourism experiences. A number of different models of creative tourism development are reviewed to illustrate these principles.

Activating Cultural Resources and Engaging Creative Travellers Edited by

Domestic and international creative tourists in Portugal: Insights for practitioners, 2021

A great diversity of definitions of creative tourists exist, ranging from those who refer to visitors of dance, art, or handicraft workshops, to those who include people who take up temporary artistic residences to practice their creative expression and develop their art forms. In recent decades, we have observed the emergence of a new generation of travellers. 1 These tourists are increasingly seeking co-creation processes, leading to more relational forms of cultural tourism, and active participation in creative experiences ( Richards, 2020 ). And yet, pinning down the diverse, nicheoriented creative tourist has been an ongoing challenge. Internationally, a number of studies have been conducted to profile the creative tourist (see Remoaldo et al., 2020 ) but no overarching comparative framework has yet been developed, and in Portugal no study on the creative tourist had previously been conducted. Within the project CREATOUR ® (Creative Tourism Destination Development in Small Cities and Rural Areas), we developed a detailed questionnaire for participants in the creative tourism pilot activities organized within the project, which was applied by the 40 participating organizations as they conducted their pilot activities in 2017, 2018, and 2019. These activities were developed and situated in small cities and rural areas in the Norte, Centro, Alentejo, and Algarve regions of the Portugal mainland. They ranged from small-scale participatory cultural festivals to gastronomy workshops to handicraft, mosaic-making, and other hands-on workshops. The common thread was an aspiration to develop creative tourism activities adhering to the CREATOUR ® approach to creative tourism, which incorporates active participation, learning, opportunities for creative self-expression, and connections to the local community. The questionnaire enabled us to gain insights on socio-demographic characteristics, motivations, behaviours, experiences, and perceptions of the activities – providing a rich source of insights on the creative tourist in Portugal. In this chapter, we present highlights of these questionnaire results, segmented by place of residence (i.e. domestic or international visitors) and suggest some implications of these findings. A motivational analysis of creative tourist participants can be found in Remoaldo et al. (2020) . Based on socio-demographic, travel behaviour, and motivation-based criteria, three clusters were found: novelty seekers, knowledge and skills learners, and leisure creative seekers.

Journal of Tourism Consumption and Practice Volume 4 Special Issue on Exploring Creative Tourism

Journal of Tourism Consumption and Practice, 2012

This special issue of the Journal of Tourism Consumption and Practice considers many different facets of the creative tourism phenomenon, and examines the ways in which it has been developed in a range of places, ranging from the frozen north of Canada to the searing heat of Mali. The papers that compose this special issue identify trends and challenges in creative tourism development and, despite the emergent critical thoughts on the subject, they tend to emphasise the positive aspects.

Trends and Challenges in Creative Tourism

Paper presented at the International Conference on Creative Tourism, Barcelona December, 9th - 10th 2010. Creative tourism is a concept that only formally defined a decade ago, but in the intervening years it has seen a significant growth worldwide. The range of presentations at this conference on different creative tourism programmes from all corners of the globe is a clear indication of how widespread it now is. In this presentation I will try and set out some of the reasons for this growth, the different forms of creative tourism that have developed and the challenges that remain for those involved in this new sector of tourism. My basic argument is that the growth of creative tourism has been driven by both production and consumption related forces, and that the maximum benefit can be derived by creatively combining the efforts of both producers and consumers to develop new experiences that both engage and transform participants and host communities alike.

Creative Tourism: The CREATOUR Recipe Book

CinTurs, 2020

The vision of creative tourism that has guided the CREATOUR project has been one of active creative activity encouraging learning, personal self-expression, and interaction between visitors and local residents, inspired by local endogenous resources (place and people), and designed and implemented by local residents. In brief, we have viewed creative tourism as including four dimensions: active participation, learning, creative self-expression, and community engagement. Underlining all these elements is always the place in which the activities are set-its natural features, its cultures and history, its stories and imaginaries, and the people who have lived there and continue to give it vibrancy. Altogether, they inspire, inform, and give character to these activities-and enable the development of distinctive creative tourism offers with local resonance and meaningfulness. Creative tourism offers a platform for a wide variety of activities that can, on one hand, meet the cravings of a diverse public eager for new, unique, and special experiences through which they can learn skills and creatively express themselves, and, on the other, meet the growing need for communities to articulate, experiment with, and build on their distinctive identity(ies). Of course, the travellers themselves-bringing their own perspectives, knowledges, skills, questions, curiosity, laughter, and fears-also provide sparks and ingredients for these creative activities. The creative process of making blends well with travel. Creative tourism is the atelier, the bar, the restaurant, the party-venue, the gathering place where they can meet.

Panorama of Creative Tourism Around the World

2018

Creative tourism has now been developing for almost 20 years since the first seeds were sown for this niche form of tourism in the late 1990s. This paper reviews the development of creative tourism over the past 20 years, and analyses the different forms of creative tourism in different parts of the world.