VIA REGIA - Der Kulturtourist als Rezipient

The functions of the Geographical Informationsystem VIA REGIA will be shown with the “model region Thuringia” and step by step broaden to other regions.

How fast this process will go depends on interest and contribution of active partners as well as possibiblities of financing.

The cultural tourist as recipient

Not all tourists that visit places of cultural interest are cultural tourists. Many travellers include cultural activi-ties only as addition to their hiking holiday or culinary excursions. Following the European Cultural Tourism Project of the European Association for Tourism and Leisure Education (ATLAS) only 9 percent of all tourists are ‘specific cultural tourists'. All the others who do not have a distinctive cultural motivation can be described as 'general cultural tourists'.

As well as on supply-side not every cultural institution wants to open itself to tourism also on demand-side there are several fields of interest for cultural tourism. In present there are many studies on questions of cultural tourism that vary in description of different interest groups. We follow the definition of the following groups:

Tourists that are cultural highly motivated travel to cities or regions in order to visit theatres, museums or festivals. Their most important reason to travel is visiting a cultural destination. 15 percent of the supraregional tourists belong to this group.
The second group consists of persons whose cultural motive is only partial. They do not travel to cities only because of its cultural offerings but also e.g. to visit friends. The cultural motive is as meaningful as other travel motives. 30 percent of the tourists belong to this group.
The next group consists of tourist who chose foreign places for non-cultural reasons. Reaching there they behave open-minded about cultural attractions. 20 percent of the tourists belong to this group.
For ‚casually cultural tourists' the cultural motive has even lesser meaning. They only visit cultural institutions if they are taken out by friends or if the offerings are within spitting distance to the hotel. Also 20 percent belong to this group.

At last 15 percent of the tourists generally refuse cultural activities in the narrow sense.

In their holiday the majority of tourists does not only long for culture but for various and diverse offerings. As we can see from this typology many tourists are not strongly interested in cultural offerings but they are open-minded to it as long as they are made aware of sights, the attractions are easily obtainable and as long as tourist get an adequate value for their investments of time and money.

Following that cultural tourism is a multifaceted phenomenon and the protagonists, the cultural tourists are a heterogeneous group. So how places and landscapes as well as respective myths are mediated and how tourists/ visitors/ travellers receipt them?

Against this background an information-/ marketing strategy for the presentation of the VIA REGIA as Mayor Cultural Route of the Council of Europe is of vital importance in view of selecting the target groups and the medium of placing the information.

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