I thought I would start this blog with a little bit about myself. I was born and raised in a suburb of Washington, D.C. along with my three sisters. I really enjoyed growing up there but when I was in high school I studied in Barcelona for one summer and decided that I wanted to live in Europe when I "grew up." Ever since then, I have loved travelling and sought out interesting and unique experiences abroad. I went to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville where I studied Psychology as well as doing a Master's in Elementary Education at the same time. I spent one semester during my third year in Ireland at University College Dublin. I also spent one summer teaching English at a children's camp in France. I realized through these experiences that I really loved travelling and decided that I wanted to go back to school for a Master's in Tourism.
I decided that teaching was not the right profession for me but I still love working with kids and young adults. Therefore, my dream job would be to work for a company that offers educational tours/programs for students interested in learning about other cultures, languages, and destinations.
Following this theme, I decided to research creative tourism for our first assignment in Foundations of Scholarship. I found it really interesting because it is not something I have done before and it falls into the category of "educational tourism." I think it's really great that there are people out there looking for a holiday that is more than just sitting on the beach while sipping a mojito. I have learned about many different types of creative holidays from painting courses in Italy to week-long cooking retreats in rural Portugal.
There is not much research done on creative tourism since it's still considered to be a "niche" tourism category; however, I did manage to find a couple of really interesting articles. The three main articles that I used in my literature review for Foundations of Scholarship were:
Lindroth, K., Ritalahti, J., and Soisalon-Soininen, T. (2007) ‘Creative Tourism in Destination Development.’ Tourism Review, 62(3+4), pp. 53-8.
Richards, G. (2011) ‘Creativity and Tourism: The State of the Art.’ Annals of Tourism Research, 38(4), pp.1225-1253.
Richards, G. and Wilson, J. (2006) ‘Developing creativity in tourist experience: A solution to the serial reproduction of culture?’ Tourism Management, 27, pp. 1209-1223.
The three main ideas that I gathered from these articles were that creativity can serve as a solution to the "serial reproduction of culture", creative tourism gives more power to the local community, and creative tourism gives tourists an authentic experience that allows self-development and active involvement with the local culture.
The main issue with creative tourism is that most people do not know what it is! Here is an excerpt from my Foundations of Scholarship literature review:
According to the results of a case study by Lindroth et al (2007) in Finland, there is little awareness of what creative tourism actually means. Richards points to some research by the Association for Tourism and Leisure Education, which indicated in 2004 that only around 5% of cultural visitors in Europe identified their holidays as being “creative.” Therefore, he suggests that tourists either do not understand what “creative tourism” means or tourists do not identify with creativity. Thus he thinks that, “…it is unlikely that [creative tourism] will move into the mass market of cultural tourism” (p. 1245).
I think that this issue would be very interesting to look at for my dissertation. Basically I want to know why there is little awareness of what creative tourism is, what the characteristics of creative tourists are (which one of the articles mentioned has not yet been identified), and whether creative tourism is currently being marketed to the right target groups.
I think I could contribute interesting research (even if it's on a small scale) by looking at the characteristics of tourists participating in creative holidays at a few destinations in England and seeing how that compares to the current marketing strategies for these holidays. I don't know yet if this is a good enough dissertation topic so I will update when I have some feedback!
