‘Smart’ Visitor Mobility Management in the Tourist-Historic City

The multi-disciplinary study tries to establish interrelations between online mobile technology used for heritage interpretation and visitor mobility behaviour, exploring the implications that the changed behaviour patterns have for applied visitor management in UNESCO World Heritage listed historic city centres. Ubiquitous online mobile technology disperses delimitations between activities, time and space which affects and fundamentally changes everyday life including touristic utilized spaces and activities. In this ‘liquid modernity’, tourism is perceived as an essential form of mobility, increasingly changing under the influence of online mobile technologies. With this changing landscape of both, tourism and online mobile technology, interpretation of space, communication of information and the ensuing movement within a destination have to be amended accordingly. Tourism is often considered as one of the few options for economic vitality in historic cities. However, there is a fine line between tourism being an added value and support to conservation, and tourism becoming the reason for conservation. This study scrutinizes prevailing visitor mobility management strategies in historic cities in the context of changing visitor movement triggered by the increasing influence of online mobile media. For this purpose the technology awareness and acceptance of destination management organisations and the utilization of interpretive online mobile media is explored by conducting an online survey in 127 UNESCO World Heritage historic city centres, followed by an in-depth analysis in selected study areas of the compatibility of currently applied visitor mobility management strategies with prevailing behaviour of ‘connected’ visitors using sentiment analysis on data generated from social media mining