Heritage Tourism Disrupting the Hospitality Industry and Redefining Luxury

It is back to the basics. Hotels today are looking stand out from the crowd and the craze of “ultra-luxury”. The era of defining hotels with how luxurious and modern they are is gone.

Today, the focus is on authenticity, a sense of establishing real and one-on-one relationships with the customer; an era of the importance of service and personalization.

Consequently, the trends in the hotel industry identify the value and uniqueness of services provided through artistic design and craftsmanship and integrating the local culture as one of the best ways to attract customers from all over the world.

It is, therefore, safe to say that heritage tourism is bringing back the old, to shape and dictate how beautiful and luxurious a hotel is.

Many hotels today are using their unique heritage and cultural resources to increase their place-based competitive advantage. This follows the fact that today, tourists’ experience with heritage allows for the enhancement of a national image, that enables visitors to conceive, imagine and confirm their belonging to the nation.

The latest trends have seen the hospitality industry provide a mix of tangible and intangible experiences that contribute to cultural values while at the same time driving the sales.

Hotels today focus on the consumer-driven need for unique experiences as opposed to product-driven perspectives.

People are constantly looking for the wow factor. However small something can be, if it creates a meaningful experience for someone, the word will spread out and more visitors will come.

Seeing as to how the world has changed and how technology is everywhere, it wouldn’t make sense for a person to travel across the world to experience the same kind of feeling they would have had back home.

As such, people are looking for unique experiences and what better way to offer that than through heritage tourism incorporation?

Unifying hotel spaces with the surrounding defines the new luxury. Allowing the local culture to flow seamlessly through your hotel is the perfect way of ensuring that visitors from various regions experience a feeling like no other.

Hotels using local products for food and décor as well as tying it up with local day trips and other service providers serving excellent cuisine from the surrounding area are more popular today for they create a wholesome local experience.

In fact, heritage lodging holds great potential as a sustainable tourism commodity in its multiple uses as a tool to promote civic pride, local identity, and cultural capital and because of its economic value, which many people want to be a part of.

Heritage tourism in hotels has largely become a significant cultural, historical and ethnic marker of authentic environments. As a hotel, the best thing to do to keep up with this trend is to strive to create an emotional connection with people, the product and the brand.