Building Bridges to Sustainability: Sustainable Development
Role of Community Museums in Rural Tourism, Manitoba, Canada
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Christopher D. Malcolm, Doug Ramsey
Rural tourism development is increasingly seen as a source for economic diversification in regions facing loss and restructuring of their traditional rural resource industries. One initiative in the pursuit of tourism economies are community museums, which often already exist in many communities. This paper introduces the results of a survey of visitors and interviews with museum directors, at eighteen community museums in southwestern Manitoba, Canada, conducted between June and September, 2015 and 2016. The questionnaire collected data regarding visitor demographics, purpose for visit, expectations, and satisfaction. Interviews with museum directors obtained information about museum operations. Visitors were primarily tourists (75.8%), many of whom planned their museum visit, illustrating that the museums are a touristic draw. Further, 30% of respondents indicated they would be visiting other museums in the region within the next few days, and 48.1% sometime in the future. Visitors reported high satisfaction for viewing and learning about museum displays. However, open-ended comments included statements that reflect difficulties in operations, such as desires for better lighting, air flow, labeling, and display organization. Museum directors elucidated these issues: the museums are run by an aging, volunteer staff, with little training in museum curation, that list a lack of volunteers, local interest, space, and operating capital as major difficulties. Some directors fear their museums will not exist within five to ten years. This paper argues that community museums, as sources of community identity and pride, should be recognized as an important and supported segment of sustainable rural tourism development.
Understanding Innovation in the Gastronomic Industry: Variety and Effectiveness of Innovative Practices in Touristic Restaurants in Cusco, Peru
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Maria E Sanchez Zambrano, Mario Marcello Pasco-Dalla-Porta, Maria Elena Esparza
In the last few years, the Peruvian gastronomy has experienced an unprecedented success. Hundreds of new restaurants have emerged across the country, offering creative combinations of food and service. Surprisingly, there are very few systematic studies on practices of innovation within the sector, and research adopting a customer-based approach is practically nonexistent. In this regard, this paper has two purposes. First, it provides a detailed account of the variety of innovative practices along the dimensions of product, service, infrastructure, and socio-environmental issues. Second, it assesses the effectiveness of those practices in terms of cost-efficiency, clientele, and customer satisfaction. The study will focus on 120 touristic restaurants in Cusco, Peru, which is the main touristic destination in the country. The research methodology will include structured observation of restaurants as well as in/depth interviews with local experts. In this way, this research makes a contribution to the understanding of innovative practices in the gastronomic industry. In addition, it expects to provide a new tool for researchers interested in measuring sectoral innovations in developing countries.
Characterization of Mass Nature Tourism: The Case of Masca (Rural Park of Teno, Tenerife)
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alberto Jonay Rodríguez Darias
The village of Masca, with more than 700,000 annual visits, is a tourist resource of the first order; playing a major role both in the activities offered and in the image projected in the tourist system of the destination Tenerife. The ways of using this space, the activities developed, the profile of visitors and the impacts generated are very heterogeneous. This paper presents a diagnosis of the tourist system that is manifested in the village from a polyhedral perspective and analyzes the experience linked to the project for the implementation of the Masca Nature Centre, which includes the characterization of tourists from a survey of 601 visitors.
