Value creation through heritage and identity

Abstract

Building a strong experience value has become the backbone of increasingly sophisticated tourism. This chapter focuses on how the aspects of identity and heritage are used to build experience value and what the possible outcomes would be for such utilization. This chapter aims to put factors of consumer behavior together with major and minor psychological and physical perspectives in a broad framework. The chapter considers value as a multidimensional concept, including a range of meanings since value may be attributed to rank, significance, material or monetary worth, power, usefulness. Heritage is defined as physical objects and places which have been passed on from one generation to another and it incorporates divergent practices and intangible properties such as language and cultural behavior. Cultural identity refers to the current cultural linkage between individuals and their environment. Combining these two, presence of cultural heritage leads individuals obtain some non-material benefits.