Tourism–Culture Synergy and Visitor Experience: A Management Perspective on Cultural Destination Competitiveness

Abstract

The emerging trend in cultural destinations is that effective integration of tourism and culture are becoming a crucial part of building on visitor experience and maintaining competitive advantage in experience-based tourism economy. The importance of the concept of tourism-culture synergy, visitor experience and destination competitiveness has been broadly studied, but the current literature is conceptually disjointed and impartially amorphous as a management construct. This gap has been resolved in this review by a systematic integrative synthesis of peer reviewed literature on cultural tourism, visitor experience and destination competitiveness. The review not only tracks the development of the cultural tourism domain of research but also summarises the core aspects of visitor experience in a cultural setting in addition to looking at how management and governance architecture can facilitate or inhibit the tourism-culture synergy. The synthesis makes it clear that visitor experience cannot be perceived as a consequence of the development of cultural tourism, but a strategic process in which the tourism-culture synergy is converted into the competitiveness of the destination. Following these observations, the paper constructs a form of integrative conceptual framework that places management competencies like cross-sector coordination, experience orchestration, and policy alignment as the forces of competitive advantage of cultural destinations. This review illustrates the conceptual relationships, research gaps that persist, and future research directions to add value to the academic field of tourism and management and also provide practical implications on the ways in which destination managers and policymakers can exploit cultural assets to achieve sustainability in competitiveness.