The “visitor-friendliness” of cultural-tourist cities – Reflection on “Planning considerations for cultural tourism: a case study of four European cities”
Zhang Yali
An increasing number of European cities have selected tourism as a strategic sector for local development.Under this background, this paper discusses and tests a framework of reference for “visitor-friendliness” of cultural-tourist cities by taking four European cities for example.
Cultural tourism has opportunities and problems as well. Cultural tourism does can promote the development of urban economy. Cultural tourism industry is sustainable and plentiful in synergies with other strategic sectors of the urban economy.
However, tourism also has some financial problem for the preservation and restoration of the heritage that should be taken attention to. There are the compatibility between the development of a tourism industry and the preservation of the heritage ‘‘out of the market’’; the existing and potential synergies and tensions between the ‘‘global’’ tourism system and the ‘‘local’’socio-economic development.
It is therefore necessary that the tourism planners bring together development and sustainability, on more than one scale: the spatial, the socio-economic and obviously the environmental. Tourism development requires that a number of basic conditions regarding the quality of hospitality are met which are always overlooked in cultural and tourism planning.
In this context, two elements—almost in contradiction, but interrelated—determine the success of a tourist destination. The first is the necessity to create a tourist infrastructure of internationalstandards and with a high degree of predictability that allows the destination to be attractive. The second is presence of increasingly fragmented impulses coming from the marketplace, and identifying niche positions in the market.
To establish the ‘‘visitor-friendliness’’ of cultural-tourist cities, the article focuses on the relationships between a consumer oriented management strategy for the system of cultural resources and other layers oftourism policy.
The factors that determine the competitiveness of a destination have been synthesised in the ‘‘tourism product’’ — a model of the overall attractiveness of an urban destination, concept by Van den Berg etc. The five basic factors are the quality of ‘‘primary’’ tourist products (the
elements that represent the main reasons for a visit to the locality); the quality of the secondary or complementary products; the image of the destination; the accessibility of the destination, articulated in external (the effort required to reach the destination) and internal accessibility (the ease of wandering around the destination and reaching the various attraction points during the
stay).
The quality of primary and secondary products, the image and accessibility can be improved through deliberate actions by the industry and the government. These five factors have been made operational to permit an international comparative analysis. To achieve this, a number of
qualitative indicators have been evaluated for each city. These are:
- Existence of a strategy for tourism management at themetropolitan level.
- Quality of information and hospitality.
- Presence and quality of secondary or complementary tourist services.
- The internal and external accessibility
- Attractions and events.
European Institute for Comparative Urban Research (EURICUR) has research a series of case studies utilizing the ‘‘uninformed visitor’’ approach. The cities selected for the research—Lyon, Lisbon, Rotterdam and Turin—present a series of features that are utilized to test a reference
framework of their ‘‘visitor-friendliness’’. The case studies highlight how specific soft elements of the urban tourism product are the ones that matter most in determining the attractiveness of a city for international visitors, and yet they are often overlooked by city planners.
These four cities are given comparative analysis from following aspects: strategies; information and hospitality; secondary tourism products and services; internal and external accessibility; attractions and events; image and atmosphere.
There are some lessons we can learn from the case studies. The first is that the ‘‘soft’’ parts of the primary and secondary tourist products and internal accessibility are indeed important preconditions for effective tourist development.
The analysis of visitor-friendliness in the four cities not only underscores the main deficiencies in the quality of hospitality, but also permits an inventory of ‘‘best practice’’ in tourism management: A tourist card distributed in Lisbon; a ‘‘transition’’ stage has successfully
completed in Turin, like opening of important museums and exposition centers; fromstrategically located tourist kiosks, to the enormous variety of brochures, programs and totems, visitors are assisted 24 h a day in Lyon. All the cities are willing to inform visitors by utilizing the Internet
technology. And local authority management organizes not only for the effective design of the transport network but also fortourism management.
According to the comparative analysis system, we can adopt it to Weimar, which is also a cultural tourist city. Weimar’s cultural heritage is vast. It was the home of the leading characters of the literary genre of Weimar Classicism — the writers Goethe and Schiller, and the musician Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was born here. The city was also the birthplace of the Bauhaus movement. Many places in the city center have been designated as UNESCO World Heritage sites.
These provide rich resources of primary tourist products of Weimar. Concerts, theatre performances, festivals or traditional markets: Weimar’s cultural calendar is bursting at the seams, as the secondary products, attractions and events. Quality of information and hospitality are not as good as Lyon, which should be promoted to provide more convenience to tourists.
Public transport systems in Weimar are generally effective. Well, the internal and external accessibility can be better. And the strategiesfor tourism management should be discussed in the next step. Meanwhile, we can learn some “best practice’’ in tourism management from these
cities, such as tourist card, internet technology and so on.
In conclusion, this study contributes a redefinition of the ‘‘hospitality function’’ of a city, because it highlights itsinfrastructure and organizational preconditions. The various elements of the tourist product—primary and secondary products, events, transports, information centers and packing— have to be systemized and managed according to an integrated and dynamic approach, for instance using the opportunities offered by new technologies. Also, professionalism, creativity and the capacity to astonish remain the most important elements.
the Unseen in the City 
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