Volume 4, Issue 2

Global cultural tourism constitutes a particular aspect of intercultural contact. When examining tourism more closely, can it be viewed as an intercultural encounter for the purpose of a dialogue? Is understanding of and interaction with a foreign culture promoted merely by visiting a site enhanced and prepared for cultural tourism? How can cultural tourism contribute to the understanding and interaction between global guests and local hosts? In the following these questions will be discussed by the subject of world heritage tourism. Due to UNESCO’s educational objective to promote worldwide understanding for different ways of acting, life and thinking, world heritage tourism provides a good example for the debate on the idea of intercultural encounters. The article is based on theoretical approaches of space for analysing the conditions and problems of the intercultural potential of world heritage tourism.

The study under consideration is based on an online survey that reveals individual travel motives and country images as well as attitudes towards cultural differences of 255 selected world travellers (STA Travel). These young protagonists, most of them are moving six months along tourist routes are well educated. They spend little money while travelling and, most importantly, one has observed that they become only loosely acquainted with people. The most common underlying motive is the quest for the foreign itself and the unknown surrounding oneself. Moreover, most world travellers are profoundly influenced by a prevailing attitude towards ethnorelativism. But, image preferences for certain countries rarely change during a trip around the world. However, a traveller’s longer stay in a foreign country definitely improves his image of this particular country and its local people.

For many tourists a slum is regarded as an alien and problematic context. Entering a slum they encounter a foreign physical, social and cultural space. The touristic appropriation of this space - called site by Schatzki - cannot follow habitual practices and has a great potential for irritations. According to the concept of culture confusion by Hottola, these irritations should not be valued negatively, as they also lead to new insights and knowledge. The visit of the Thai slum Klong Toey by participants of a student field trip serves as case study for this paper. Results of this qualitative research show that confusions are not dissolved completely after the visit, even though the slum and its inhabitants are regarded as being authentic. However, since the visitors also participated in everyday practices of the slum dwellers, the experience was remembered positively. Moreover, during the field trip a cultural exchange was made possible which was appreciated by the visitors and by the visited as well.

Competition in the tourism industry is getting tougher and tougher. The soft skills of tourism employees have therefore become the decisive factors for customer satisfaction. What challenges do employees have to face, how do they deal with the demanded requirements and what does this mean for cross-cultural encounters in international tourism? Starting from these questions I will assess the implications of emotional labor for hosts and staff and debate on the question of how cross-cultural encounter can be experienced as enrichment rather than a burden by both, hosts and staff.

This paper critically scrutinizes the relevance of tourism for intercultural learning. It shows that travelling abroad does not automatically enable tourists to engage in a deeper intercultural understanding of their tourist destinations. In most cases, travelling abroad seems to merely reinforce stereotypes and clichés centered around a tourist destination’s people, places, and culture. These clichés get intensified by the many ways in which foreign culture is being staged in order to cater to tourists’ pre-conceived notions of what a culture is about. Moreover, intercultural communication and interaction get hampered by the fact that tourists have a status that is substantially different from that of members of the local communities they visit, and that tourists typically are exposed to a destination’s culture only for a brief period of time.

Until recently, tourist routes typically led from “the West” to the so-called “rest” of the world. In this paper, I ask what happens when “the West” no longer tours “the rest”, as has been practiced for centuries, but when “the rest” starts to knock on Western doors in order to consume both the vernacular Western culture and its own heritage in place. Specifically, I investigate the continuing presence of Indian Bollywood tourists in Switzerland. Today, Swiss small towns like Engelberg display a comprehensive infrastructure that specifically cares for the Indian tourists’ needs. Based on interviews and ethnographic on-site observation, this paper explores the opportunities and risks of an unusual intercultural encounter.

After the ratification of UNESCO’s convention for the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage in Switzerland, a list of living traditions was created via a multilevel inventory process. Additionally, an interdisciplinary research project was launched, which investigates the valuing and use of intangible heritage for tourism purposes. A conference was held and a guidebook about the realization/development of tourism products was published. The participation of all relevant actors is a key factor for the inventory process, as well as for the development of tourism products.