Tourism and Heritage Are Not Strangers: A Study of Opportunities for Rural Heritage Museums to Maximize Tourism Visitation

Heritage tourism is growing rapidly in popularity as people seek to rediscover the past. One obvious group of attractions heritage tourists seek out are museums. Many museums are outside the government sector, and for these museums, tourism offers considerable scope to generate revenue to fund new displays and pay recurrent costs. This study reports on a survey of three Queensland rural heritage museums designed to discover visitors’ reactions to the communication channels used to alert them to the existence of the museums and to identify the visitors’ preferred methods of advertising. The outcome of the survey identifies the need for museum custodians to reconsider the promotional strategies employed to advertise rural museums to the drive tourist market and suggests a simple checklist of low-cost yet effective advertising methods that can be used by rural museums.