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The heritage tourism product
Researchers and managers have a tendency to divide tourism into types as a way of facilitating research and creating knowledge, marketing, planning, and managing impacts. Just as tourism is often subdivided into forms such as nature-based, sport, heritage, health, and adventure, heritage tourism can also be divided into parts or subtypes as a way of presenting its complexities and understanding its distinctive characteristics. This is usually done from both supply and demand perspectives, in that types of heritage tourism (and tourism in general) are defined by the places, events, and artifacts observed or visited (i.e., consumed), as well as by the motives of and activities undertaken by the tourists who consume them. Research suggests that, in most cases, people visit heritage places to enhance learning, satisfy curiosity and feelings of nostalgia, grow spiritually, relax, get away from home, spend time with loved ones, or “discover themselves” (Confer and Kerstetter 2000; Krakover and Cohen 2001; Poria et al. 2004; Prentice et al. 1997; Timothy 1997; Timothy and Boyd 2003). One recent study (Nyaupane et al. 2006) classified heritage tourists into three types based upon their motivations: culture-focused, cultureattentive, and culture-appreciative. These motivations, combined with relics from the past, create a range of heritage tourism types that are examined in the paragraphs that follow, all of which are important constituents of the heritage product in the less-developed world.
Religious tourism is one of the most prevalent forms of heritage tourism in the developing world today and is among the earliest precursors of modernday tourism. Pilgrimage takes many forms, but central among these is the desire of religious adherents to supplicate deity for blessings, become closer to God, offer more sincere prayers, become healed, and receive forgiveness for sins. Much pilgrimage requires self-humbling and penitence, which can be effected more readily in some cases by the afflictions associated with traveling along a prescribed pilgrim route (Shair and Karan 1979). In some religious traditions, the pathway to the religious site can be as enlightening and spiritually moving as arriving at the holy site itself (Bhardwaj 1983; Cousineau 2000; González and Medina 2003). This form of travel is required or encouraged in Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity, and many of the most sacred places on earth are located in the developing countries of the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. In India, for example, domestic and international travel by Hindus for religious purposes is an important part of the tourism economy, and the Kumba Mela religious pilgrimage is the largest tourist gathering in the world (Singh 2006).
Pilgrimage should be considered a form of heritage tourism from at least three perspectives. First, the sites visited are heritage places, including churches, mosques, temples, synagogues, shrines, sacred mountains, and caves/grottos. Second, pilgrimage routes have become heritage resources based on their historical role in the practice of pilgrimage. Finally, the forms of worship and the religious rites undertaken at venerated places have become part of an intangible heritage, or a set of socio-cultural practices that demonstrate inwardly and outwardly the weightiness of the journey.
Diaspora tourism is a form of ethnic and personal heritage tourism, wherein people from various backgrounds travel to their homelands in search of their roots, to celebrate religious or ethnic festivals, to visit distant or near relatives, or to learn something about themselves (Coles and Timothy 2004). Significant numbers of people from various diasporas travel to their homelands each year in fulfillment of predictions that heritage tourism is as much related to the individual and social identities of the tourists themselves as it is about the historic places they visit (Breathnach 2006; McIntosh 2008; Poria et al. 2003, 2006). Indians and Pakistanis are known for traveling to South Asia
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