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

TLDR

The article clarifies heritage tourism by identifying and segmenting reasons for visiting heritage sites and demonstrating that links between site attributes and tourists are essential to understanding motivations. The study surveyed English‑speaking international tourists departing Israel through Ben‑Gurion airport using structured face‑to‑face questionnaires and applied an interpretability approach to exploratory factor analysis to group responses. The analysis identified three reason groups—heritage, learning, and recreational—linked to tourists’ perception of the site relative to their own heritage and their willingness for emotional experiences, offering insights for operational management and marketing of heritage sites.

Abstract

This article clarifies heritage tourism by identifying and segmenting reasons for visiting heritage sites. In doing so, it shows 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. 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. Reasons for visiting heritage sites were classified into three groups: “heritage experience,” “learning experience,” and “recreational experience.” Reasons for visiting heritage sites were 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 relevant to the operational management of spaces presenting history-related artifacts and to the marketing of these sites.