Levels of Heritage Tourism Experience and Their Perception

Running head; Tourism experience 1
Tourism experience
Student name
Institutional affiliation

Tourism experience 2
INTRODUCTION
Heritage tourism is becoming popular among the tourism branches due to the eagerness
of tourist's understanding and reconnects themselves with the past. Heritage tourism is concerned
with cultural and heritage and the location where tourism sites are. (Graham, 2016) (Carson,
2014) Cultural heritage involves traveling to different places, to observe activities that were
carried out in the past and those that are carried out in the present activities. (Carson, 2014) Due
to the adventurous spirit, tourism has shifted toward heritage and culture. Some of the locations
visited includes trade sites, where trade was taking place an example long distance traders along
the Sahara desert areas in Africa, where slaves were being kept before being transported,
especially the trading location where the slave trade took place, places where war took place are
also a very important site to be visited by tourist, tourist like to visit such places to verify what
they learn from the history and satisfy their perception of their history. A historical event is
unforgettable, and hence everyone likes to learn where the war took place and what happened
after the war. Both slavery sites and war sites are too important because they evoke emotions of
anger, sorrow, and anguish. Tourists are able to reconnect themselves with the past event.
Communities have different cultures which differ from other community. Heritage tourism is
becoming popular because the individual has that thirst of learning other culture. Most of the
communities tend to preserve their culture and pass it to the succeeding generation; this leads us
to discuss the Timothy 1997 model of’ levels of heritage experience’ for tourism, this model
shows the following levels; local heritage, personal heritage, and national heritage. (DeCorse,
2016) The paper is about defining what is perceived as, experience and how the levels integrate
to give out an experience that the tourist needs and be able to motivate tourist to always visit the
site

Tourism experience 3
The meaning of heritage tourism is verse, and everyone has his own explanation of the
meaning of heritage. (Banerjee, 2017)To define the meaning of the word heritage, there is a need
to review what constitutes heritage.
Heritage tourism not only based on the sites and location of heritage places but the
impression that the sites give, the site perfection and how the site vividly verifies the past or
present event. Heritage tourism is. Hence on this paper heritage tourism is the perfection of the
tourism site, the site motivation towards the experience of the tourist and the site should be
capable of verifying the past by providing both tangible and intangible elements that act as proof,
in order to connect the tourist with the past.
LEVELS OF HERITAGE TOURISM
The study focuses on Timothy levels of heritage experience; this determines the
perception and the experience the tourist have while exploring the heritage site. The levels try to
distinguish different perception according to a different level of heritage tourism experience.
Timothy's model describes the difference in the measure of the scale of different level in tourism
experience and how they are linked together to form shared heritage. Which combines both
levels to explain the experience of the tourists on the heritage sites. (Yan, 2016)
World scale heritage connects the experience of all world visitors to a heritage site. This
is whereby visitors come from different countries to experience a heritage. (Maitland, 2014)
Example of heritage is FORT JESUS heritage. (Bita, 2015) which is situated in Kenya on the
coastal region, this site serves as world heritage site that attracts the world tour to come and learn
and see a site that was created by Asian before the colonial days, the experience that is exhibited
by the world tour is not personally attached as, it could be the case on the personal heritage,