Glossary of Concepts on Creative Tourism

App for Creative Tourism

An app is an abbreviated form for application. An application is a software programme designed to perform functions directly to the users. Apps have become very popular with mobile devices, but they can also be downloaded for PC, Web or television devices. An app for Creative Tourism is more related to mobile devices and should be designed to amplify information about activities, organisers, local government and places, and oriented users.

Augmented Reality in Creative Tourism

Immersive technology enhances the real world by overlaying multimedia content in the Augmented Reality (AR) or creating a new reality by fully immersing users in a Virtual Environment (VR) using a device. It varies according to the degree of user immersion. AR is a promising tool for Creative Tourism in line with development of mobile technologies whereby adding layers of information about tangible and intangible elements can strengthen tourism experiences. With AR, the tourist does not lose contact with the physical environment, which is mainstream for tourism activity, maintaining place authenticity.

Authentic Experience

The consumer (in general) and the tourist (in particular) have become more demanding in recent decades regarding the quality of products and services to which they wish to have access. Among the characteristics of this new consumer is the desire to differentiate themselves from others, whether in terms of consumption practices or lifestyle.

In the aim of this new consumer profile, the issue of offering authentic and memorable experiences to tourists should be addressed. This cannot be ensured any other way than relying on the attributes and culture of the places visited and, to a certain degree, without emerging in the local culture. So, the authenticity of the experience relates closely with identity, diversity and biodiversity dimensions of territories towards which the tourist is exposed, which are always singular.

Co-creation

Generally speaking, co-creation is linked to the following concepts: ‘cooperation’; ‘cultural exchange’; ‘co-participation’; ‘working together’; ‘engagement’; and ‘sense of belonging’.

When we talk about co-creation in tourism, we refer to an interaction between residents and tourists in the process of providing the tourist experience in which he/she plays an active role and can express his/her creativity. In this way, a product or service is recreated based on local knowledge and traditions, thus conferring authenticity and uniqueness to the destination. Thus, it implies establishing a fluid open relation between residents and tourists and some kind of innovative and sustainable thought and action. Territories and local communities should play a central role in all the processes. Providing co-creation experiences to visitors envisages addressing the needs of an increasing amount of contemporary tourists, providing a new way of matching their needs and wishes, running away from standardised products and their passive consumption.

Community-Based Tourism

Community-based tourism is a type of tourism that allows visitors to experience the local community and culture differently and more authentically. It can take many forms (e.g. homestay programmes where visitors stay with the local community and visit local villages and artisans who are linked to traditional crafts).

This segment should be supported and led by the local community itself.

It leads to affirmation and confirmation from communities of the real value, social or commercial, placed on them. Residents can acquire a source of income through this type of segment, and there is a real gain for the whole community.

Competitiveness of a Tourism Destination

It is a broad and multidisciplinary concept and very sensible for policymakers since the success of a destination is determined by its attractiveness relative to other destinations.

The competitiveness of a tourism destination is the ability of the destination to use its natural, cultural, human and capital resources efficiently to develop and deliver quality, innovative, ethical and attractive tourism products and services in order to achieve sustainable growth within its overall vision and strategic goals. Therefore, it includes increasing the added value of the tourism sector, improving and diversifying its market components and optimising its attractiveness and benefits for visitors and the local community in a sustainable manner.

It is the ability to add value and thus increase wealth by managing assets and processes, integrating these relationships within the framework of an economic and social model that considers the destination's natural capital and its preservation for future generations. Every destination that wishes to improve its competitiveness must try to maintain its position before its competitors and improve it over time.

Creative Tourism

It is a tourism segment which emerged just 22 years ago at the beginning of 2000. It envisages providing a flexible and innovative experience to visitors based on local meanings, histories, identities and designs, allowing them to develop personal abilities. This type of tourism tends to oppose the conventional/traditional one regarding the role of local stakeholders and the tourists' experience and, from these results, its potential for acting as a lever of local development.

The starting point for providing creative tourist experiences is the culture and people from visited places. It implies the organisation of workshops and creative activities involving restricted amounts of participants. This will ensure the preservation of intangible heritage and the sustainability of destinations and improve residents' quality of life.

Creative Tourist

The term ‘creative tourist’ is linked to someone who wishes to learn (by doing) about arts and crafts, gastronomy or design, and someone who finds enjoyment and fulfilment in developing new abilities. Creative tourists are more active and involved in the culture of the countries and communities they are visiting. As a part of the general consumer of our post-materialist society, the creative tourist tends to claim a particular identity and lifestyle and wishes to distinguish oneself from the other. Educational, emotional, social and participative interaction with places and people are some features of tourists' active role play at destinations.

Cluster

The cluster concept emerged from the discussions of industrial districts made by Marshal in 1890. The discussion passed by industrial agglomerations until the early 1990s of the twentieth century when Porter presented the cluster concept that is based on an ample geographical and functional indeterminacy of the synergies built between groups of firms, other kinds of institutions, including public and private research ones. Currently, the cluster concept is applied both in industrial realities and in service activities.

It is essential to emphasise a region where a cluster is delimited, must be specialised in the cluster sector and be recognised by this sector. This concept is necessary and relevant when considering Creative Tourism and can be faced as an excellent solution to the sustainability of this segment.

Creative Activities

Creative activities and performances can occur in various forms of arts, namely architecture, handicrafts, design, fashion, music, games and video games, painting, photography, sculpture, dancing, singing, gastronomy and cooking, pottery and porcelain, and so on. They can help emerge the creative potential of each participant and are the basis of Creative Tourism.

Creative Class

The creative class consists of professionals from different fields, such as Architecture, Engineering, Design, Arts and Music, who have an economic role in creating new ideas, creative content and new technologies. It is a cosmopolitan class, often from the middle and upper classes of society. It is also characterised by moving away from traditional behaviours and standardisation and adopting more flexible and independent attitudes in different aspects of social life. The creative class members are individuals directly responsible for the generation of new contents, ideas, businesses, projects and products. Even if they act more frequently in large cities, they can play an important role in less urbanised territories.

Creative Tourism Network

Creative Tourism Network is the international organisation responsible for developing Creative Tourism worldwide. It was created in 2010, and it is a non-profit organisation that works to promote diversified destinations dedicated to Creative Tourism to respond to the significant increase in visitors and tourists looking for private and personalised experiences.

Creative Tourism Platform

It is a kind of sustained network that allows access and helps discover creative destinations and supports public or private entities that join the platform. It also provides access to information for researchers who want to improve their knowledge of the phenomenon and its good practices and managers of creative projects.

Creativity

The word creativity comes from the Latin ‘creatus’, which means to create. This broad and elastic concept can be produced and consumed differently. Creativity is a transversal concept, which crosses several fields of knowledge, like Psychology, Philosophy, Economics, Geography and Arts. Everyone also enjoys it, and this is increasingly true as culture is being presented in different ways and opened to all kinds of people in the last decades. In the field of Creative Tourism, creativity is a trendy word. This concept concerns the ability of tourists to develop new skills through creation and interaction and contact with local artists and artisans.

Crowdsourcing

Mobile technologies are growing faster and are very popular among individuals. New devices are being equipped with broadband communication and many sensors for working with geospatial data, such as GPS for collecting tracks and other locations, higher resolution cameras that allow geotagged photos, climate sensors to measure weather parameters. Consequently, geospatial information can be collected by any citizen that can share them through the apps.

Civic engagement of citizens' participation in collecting and sharing surrounding information, for example, to a cloud, is named crowdsourcing and crowdsensing initiatives. Both concepts put citizens collaborating as a ‘participatory’, ‘people-centric’ or ‘crowd’ sensing way in a voluntary or paid basis. Crowdsourcing comprises a crowd, where a big group of users collaborates, such as making an opinion about a restaurant or editing geographic features in a web map application. Users solve a few pieces of a large puzzle created by the many co-working users involved. Crowdsensing is a way for a large group of users to use sensors accomplished in devices (e.g. smartphones, wearable, smart vehicles) to collect data and share them through a platform that fuses it for community well-being.

Cultural Mapping

Cultural mapping corresponds to a process of collecting, recording, analysing and synthesising information to describe the cultural resources, networks, links and patterns of usage. It implies capturing tangible cultural resources (by mapping and delivering information about geographic entities) or intangible ones (by mapping cultural resources based on inhabitants' stories, traditions and sense of place).

Cultural Mapping Technologies

GIS (Geographic Information Systems) is a technology that is changing very fast, mainly due to the increase of the World Wide Web (WWW), Global Position Systems (GPS) and Remote Sensing. Both GIS and WWW developments create new mapping concepts of Geoweb and participatory mapping geo-mashup. Along with it also immersive technologies (AR and VR) have become very popular and attractive to perform representations of tangible (museums, houses, ancient roads) and intangible (memories, music, language) things. Cultural mapping is a tool and a group of techniques that comprise a wide range of geographic techniques from community participation data and GIS, tangible and intangible assets.

Cultural Tourism

Cultural tourism is one of the most growing segments of the tourism industry. The tourists who visit heritage sites seek, compared with the traditional products of the sea, sun and sand or massified destinations, for a value-added and authentic experience.

It corresponds to the movement of people, outside their usual place of residence, due to cultural motivations such as visiting historical/heritage or archaeological sites, visiting monuments and museums, involvement in community festivals and religious practices, participation in artistically and cultural manifestations, handicrafts, gastronomy, study tours, travel to study nature.

Cultural tourism is a segment of tourism motivated by factors like interest in the historical, artistic, scientific or heritage offerings of a destination. Aesthetic, intellectual, emotional or psychological are the dimensions of the new and deep cultural experiences expected to happen when we consider cultural tourism.

Culture

As a collective social construction, culture is the last stronghold of globalisation and characterises a society or a social group in its ways of life, value systems, traditions and beliefs. The main cultural resources are traditions, rituals, ways of life, leisure activities, art and music, language, monuments, museums, archaeology, gastronomy and history. Nevertheless, it remains an ambiguous and complex concept, besides being dynamic and adaptive.

It is also a source of local identity in the face of globalisation and has a symbiotic relationship with tourism. It tends to mediate the demarcation of territory and place identity. It represents a dimension of the built landscape.

Nowadays, in the touristic approach and considering the profile of visitors, it makes sense to approach culture in each territory/place in a holistic way.

Empty Nesters

The concept includes adults whose children have grown up and left home for college, work or simply their apartment/home. The so-called empty nesters, i.e. travellers aged 45 and over who prioritise spending more time with themselves and enjoy travelling due to global factors such as increased life expectancy, better health conditions, higher disposable incomes and more available time at retirement age.

Entrepreneurship in Creative Tourism

An entrepreneur must know the policy and forms of strategic planning for the development of Creative Tourism, in addition to being able to develop skills to identify the best opportunities for analysing markets, for strengthening and encouraging knowledge and mastery of the best strategy and marketing to create and innovate his/her products. He/she must also know the behaviour of customers/tourists as consumers and the projected image of the tourist destination itself.

Each entrepreneur should also define the best strategies, communication technologies and institutional partnerships, both with the public and private sectors, to reinforce the dynamics and growth of Creative Tourism.

Generation Alpha

Generation Alpha describes someone who was born in 2010 (the same year as the iPad). The next 20 years will be the most educated generation and the most technological one.

Generation Z

Generation Z, Gen Z or iGen is composed of young people that have never known a life without tech. They are ambitious, digital-natives and confident. Social media (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube) has a significant role for this generation. Indeed, the use of mobile before, during and after travel is one of the most known characteristics of Gen Z consumer behaviour.

Good Practices in Creative Tourism

Good practices in Creative Tourism should be based on local culture to sustain the interest of tourists in participating in creative activities and integrating the community to create ties with territories and destinations and promote and strengthen local identity. Respect for traditions and their continuity, applied to practices, is a structural aid in the cultural and creative preservation of the regions.

Enabling the knowledge of the places, activating the collaboration of tourists and visitors, is an incentive to the (co)creation process, elaborating different experiences and providing the most diverse social, economic, ethnic and minority, integrating and inclusive conditions.

It is also a reinforcement of sustainability, cultural or social, besides guaranteeing the presence, in the environment, of different activities, creating networks of balance and revitalising the legacy of the past.

The collaborative process of local institutions and companies can help support and create jobs, qualify and train artisans, and other sectors of the community, valuing and positively activating the economy and production, as well as the use of new equipment. The incentive to differentiated and creative approaches is also a good stimulus for the maintenance of the local productive forces, providing better and fairer working conditions for the communities and companies of the branch.

Image of Destination

A tourism destination is a set of services, along with an image. The image of a destination is built from a set of impressions and emotions (mental representation) and knowledge that a person develops about a certain destination. It corresponds to subjective evaluation of the destination and is the sum of beliefs, ideas and impressions a person has on it, built based on cognitive, affective and behavioural dimensions. It results from the set of information the potential visitors collect on the chosen destination and the feelings experienced.

The image depends on personal factors (sociodemographic and psychological characteristics) and stimulus factors (sources of information and previous experience). Regarding personal factors, the sociodemographic characteristics to be considered are, e.g. age, education and gender. Values, motivations, personality, lifestyle and tourism experience are psychological characteristics that influence the image formed.

The image kept on the destination influences perceived quality and satisfaction. A destination that wants to have a place in the market, capturing a place in tourists' minds, or enhancing its positioning, must envisage getting satisfaction from tourists it attracts, which also relates to the emotions it can provide. Thus, a positive image of a destination is crucial to its competitiveness.

Impacts of Tourism Activity

The impact can be considered an effect or an influence (that can be or not strong or durable) that something has on a situation or a person.

Several impacts can be considered in tourism activity, but the most relevant are economic, sociocultural and environmental. Also, they can be of a positive or negative nature.

Concerning the first ones (economic impacts), the more positive ones are: increased employment opportunities, growth of income, the opportunity for more advertising of the products and services of the hosting place and country, the attraction of investment in new facilities and infrastructure, diversification of the local economy and increase in the standards of living.

The main negative impacts are rising prices of goods, services and properties and increased cost of living. Economic impacts have a tendency to be highlighted because it is easier to measure their effects.

Taking into consideration the positive sociocultural impacts, the following ones are the more relevant: increase in community's self-esteem, increase in the standards of living, strengthening/preservation of local cultural values and traditions, contribution to the construction of a local, regional and national identity, an increase of cultural exchange (increased levels of social and cultural interaction) and opportunities to meet different cultures and different people.

The more negative ones are increased delinquent behaviour, increased crime rate, congestion and overcrowding of spaces and equipment, changing habits of residents (mimicry), conflicts between visitors and residents and increased corruption.

The positive environmental ones are the preservation of built heritage, creation of protected areas and increased protection of public spaces leading to increased public security. The negative ones to be highlighted are landscape change and degradation of the natural and built environment, increase in litter, increased noise, visual pollution and atmospheric (e.g. air quality), decrease in water quality, increase in rail and air traffic and increased traffic congestion, leading to parking problems.

Interactive Traveller

The ‘Interactive Traveller’ term was coined for the first time by New Zealand Tourism to describe New Zealand's ideal visitors. The concept describes the regular international travellers that come from a wide range of countries around the world seeking out new experiences that involve engagement and interaction. These travellers are described as highly informed and technological tourists who respect the nature and culture of the destination.

Mashup

GIS software becomes more dynamic, interactive and get-at-able to citizens using web capabilities to produce, collaborate and disseminate mapping information. Citizens have been empowered to foster public participation and collaboration in producing geographic data. The novel concept of neogeography is related to the ability of non-experts to produce, develop and disseminate maps. Traditional problems for non-experts in leading with complex databases, tools and software have been solved with mashups. It contributed significantly to empowering citizens mapping by blending data from multiple sources into a single application, making it easier and simpler to use geographic data.

Millennials

Millennials (also known as Generation Y, Net Generation, Generation Y, Peter Pan, Boomerang Generation or the Frugal Generation) are the demographic cohort that directly follows Generation X. Having been raised under the mantra ‘follow your dreams and being told they were special’, the Millennials tend to be trustful. They are often seen as slightly more optimistic about the future than other generations. Millennials are prone to postpone completing education, getting jobs and marrying and having children. Instead of following the baby boomers' dream, e.g. a house or a steady job, the Millennials want to make a difference in society. Millennials prefer to consume experiences in the tourism field, like going on a dream holiday.

Neogeography

A modern concept refers to a new way of leading with GIS that empowers citizens to foster public participation and collaboration in producing geographic data. The concept is linked to the rise of web 2.2 and is also related to the mashup concept.

Network

A connection of firms, organisations that are aiming to exchange information and technology, knowledge transfer, better communication, development of new cultural values, opportunities for business development and fostering common purpose.

Firms can be associated just on a specific project and at a specific time in a network. Differently from a cluster, in a network, a geographical location is not a fundamental characteristic.

Place

It is a ubiquitous and slippery concept. It can be our place/home or a city involving several scales. It can be found and located on a map. It is dynamic in time, and it has a history to tell and a meaning to those who live in it. So, it is an exact location and includes a location and a sense of place (personal and emotional attachment of people to place).

It is related to other concepts such as landscape and space. As far as tourism activity is concerned, its relevance derives from the need to have a place, a geographical location, for some kind of attractions, facilities and services, chosen by the tourist on a visit.

Prosumer

The term ‘prosumer’ was coined in 1980 by Alvin Toffler. It defines a type of future consumer involved in designing and producing products to make them more personalised and individualised. This concept suggests this type of consumer has more access to information, is more educated and has a monthly income that is above average.

Regional Governance

It is a regional or global institution's capacity and ability to govern and solve several economic, geopolitical and environmental issues.

Stakeholders

It corresponds to every group or person (e.g. residents, local politicians, local government organisations, business people and tourists) who can affect or is affected by achieving the aims of a destination. The integration of different stakeholders in developing a particular strategy makes tourist activity more integrative and democratic and can achieve more success.

Territorial Governance

It is a global concept linked to how spatially relevant policies (considered together) are applied. It can be assessed by its contribution to achieving the aims of spatial development policies.

Tourism Cluster

Based on cluster concepts emerges the definition of tourism cluster. Considering the particularities of tourism activity, a cluster in this sector groups together different stakeholders directly or indirectly involved with tourism, government, attractiveness and demand. The main goal of a tourism cluster is to make more competitive a tourist destination.

Tourism Destination

Tourism occurs in some kind of destination with distinct attractions (natural or human being-made), attracting visitors to diverse activities.

Geographically speaking, a tourism destination, besides being a diversified and complex concept, is a geographical area determined by climate characteristics, other natural and human characteristics and attributes of landscape, routes, infrastructures, attractions, services and hospitality, which confers capacity to attract visitors.

It includes a considerable number of elements and factors, such as the following ones that can play different roles depending on the type of tourism segment and on the type of destination (e.g. urban area, rural area, mixed area). These factors have a relationship that can be more or less strong, and only the work in partnership can contribute to a higher attraction of visitors to that destination. For that, they interact with each other in a strong or not strong way. It implies the following:

1. a geographical area with administrative limits or without them;

2. an offer of accommodation that must take into consideration the profile of visitors that visit that specific destination;

3. infrastructures of several domains, like accommodation, restaurants, museums, services and traditions;

4. attractions (e.g. natural, constructed by human beings and historic);

5. backup services (e.g. the supply of water and energy, banks, telecommunications, post, hospitals);

6. entertainment;

7. events;

8. transports and good access to resources and attractions/events;

9. political will;

10. law regulation of the destination;

11. a destination management organisation;

12. a marketing strategy to sell the product and promote the destination;

13. good hospitality – education of residents and other stakeholders is needed;

14. authenticity and symbolic creation;

15. involvement of residents in the strategy of tourism;

16. involvement of all stakeholders (private and public sector) like enterprises from the private sector, government agencies/institutions, regional and local official institutions coordinating tourism, non-profit organisations – the creation of networks;

17. relationships with regional, national and international stakeholders.

Quality of a Tourism Destination

One may say that consumers choose a product or service according to how closely it matches their tastes and interests, as well as taking into consideration how it may transform their lives and their way of thinking. By addressing the complex nature of tourist products, satisfaction largely depends on the set of attributes, such as the facilities, image and novelty, of the destination. Additionally, one may admit that the branding of places (tourist destinations) is different from the branding of its products, as places are vested with more complexity than single products. The concept of tourist attributes must be kept in mind since these are features of a product or service as perceived by the consumer (the tourist).

In other words, what is behind satisfaction the tourist gets from a visit and, so, the image he/she keeps from a destination relates closely to the ability of a set of resources to perform specific tasks or activities at the highest standards, given that economic activity requires both the cooperation and the coordination of a range of resources.

The resources can be natural, cultural or of another nature; however, the products extracted from them need to be able to fulfil a particular consumers' need, and a specific enriched territory must be competitive with others who supply a similar portfolio of products. Dealing with cultural products and tourist destinations remains, basically, the same.

Perhaps the complete definition on the quality of a tourism destination is the one from the World Tourism Organization (2018, p. 22), facing it as one of the key drivers of tourism competitiveness, claiming it is ‘the result of a process which implies the satisfaction of all tourism product and service needs, requirements and expectations of the consumer at an acceptable price, in conformity with mutually accepted contractual conditions and the implicit underlying factors such as safety and security, hygiene, accessibility, communication, infrastructure and public amenities and services. It also involves aspects of ethics, transparency and respect towards the human, natural and cultural environment’.

Tourism Activity

A complex system of different connected factors evolves dynamically and is linked to offer and tourist demand.

Tourism consumption distinguishes itself from other types of consumer demands due to, namely: (1) its emotional value, implying a strong commitment by the consumer in the acquisition process and the high expectation it tends to keep on the benefits it can extract from it; (2) the need the consumer has to visit the place where the consumption of the product/service takes place and (3) the complex nature of the tourist product, that is, the access to a particular tourist product implies the consumption of a set of other different services/products (transport, accommodation, meals, leisure, environment, shopping, etc.). The contribution of each one to a whole is essential for transforming the visit into something memorable or nothing at all.