This type of tourism includes the live and artistic forms of human expression (painting, sculptures, museums, theatre, and folklore) referred to as arts along with historical tourism, ethnic tourism and eco/nature based.
Heritage tourism is, in fact, synonymized with ‘Quality’ tourism intended to bring the tourists into closer contact with the human, natural and built environment without attracting serious negative impacts.
Cultural tourism development is community-based, participatory and designed to improve the economic and social well-being of local residents in addition to the concerned institutional and physical environment. It also pinpoints the need for careful planning to protect the integrity of sites and minimize harmful impacts.
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Moreover, the host community needs to plan ahead to ensure that cultural tourism sustains and benefits local communities socio-culturally as well as economically and is not meant simply for minting money for governments or private entrepreneurs.
The cultural tourist wants to discover the country and its culture with comprehensive understanding and to achieve all this expects knowledgeable explanation, interaction and feed-back. If, instead of going for commercialization of culture, tourism endeavours to satisfy its obligations towards society and culture, it will be more than a step forward in the direction of the desired end.
Frohlich (1993) advocates a conceptual transition from ‘Culture in Tourism consists in the modesty and patience of the host community towards the foreign guest’ to one where ‘Culture in Tourism is the modesty and open mindedness of the traveler towards the host community and its cultural situation’.
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For this, an open dialogue between the two, i.e., society and tourism can go a long way in ensuring the sought-after end in the right spirit. However, Hewison (1987) expresses a more forthright view by suggesting that instead of manufacturing goods, we should manufacture heritage. “Instead of miasma of nostalgia, we need the fierce spirit of renewal; we must substitute a critical for a closed culture, we need history, not heritage”.
