Is the World Heritage label used as a promotional argument for sustainable tourism?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to find out if Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs), in charge of promoting World Heritage Sites (WHS), use the World Heritage label in their electronic promotional tools, and if so, do promotional arguments include considerations linked to sustainable development. Design/methodology/approach A quantitative and qualitative study was conducted of web site content created by local, regional and national DMOs representing 120 organizations of World Heritage Cities member cities. Findings Results show that Western European cities are the primary users of the World Heritage label in their promotional material. Cities that obtained their label less than ten years ago use it more often for promoting tourism. Concurrently a significant theme associated with WHS categorisation is the presentation of a must‐see “tourism product”. Conversely the advertising contains little information about the protection of the site or sustainable development actions undertaken since the labelling. Practical implications Mostly a DMO communicates with tourists and visitors. It would be in the interest of WHS managers who work in partnership with these DMOs to convey why the site was labelled. Further, they need to demonstrate that obtaining the World Heritage status implies implementing sustainable development objectives. Finally, a better understanding of the economic, cultural, social and environmental issues associated with the label would help tourists appreciate their visit more. Originality/value The paper is the first insightful study of the World Heritage label usage as both a promotional argument and means of enhancing sustainable tourism practices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".