Tourism, culture and e-services : evaluation of e-services packages

Although cultural heritage has attracted much policy and research interest in recent years, it is still unclear to what extent it has a significant economic impact. In most countries the cultural tourist sector definitely represents a productive branch, which in our open world is growing in importance. Cultural capital is frequently used as a strategic development tool for urban tourist policy, often supported by eservices as a central instrument in a competitive tourist sector. The appropriate choice of packages of e-services depends on the various strategic considerations of urban stakeholders (agents), and may differ for each individual city. In this vein, the present paper offers a systematic analysis framework for supporting these choices, and employs multi-criteria analysis as a systematic evaluation methodology, in particular the regime method. Our study also provides the results of an application of the framework in actual case study research for the cities of Amsterdam, Genoa, and Leipzig, which may function as examples for other cities which can learn from good practice. The framework employed is relevant to any city that wishes to evaluate its strategy on the use of e-services in promoting its cultural heritage. Our analysis concludes that tailor-made packages of e-services that serve the needs of the stakeholders in the urban tourist sector can be compared with the help of our evaluation tools. Cultural economics, economic development, tourism development, cultural heritage tourism development