Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Heritage tourism (whether historic, cultural, or natural) is widely seen as one of the mainstays of rural tourism. Most research on heritage tourism has focused on issues such as the protection of the physical fabric at heritage attractions, balancing authenticity, and accessibility in interpretation and the meaning of heritage for people. However, the issue of the viability and sustainability of heritage tourism operations as businesses has in contrast hardly been considered. This article addresses this issue by focusing on three rural heritage tourism attractions that have experienced financial problems. In addition, the article explores two factors that may limit research into the financial viability of attractions. The first is that problems may be manifested in many different ways, of which bankruptcy and closure are only the most extreme. The second is the difficulty of gaining useful objective information from and regarding businesses in trouble.
Warwick Frost (Wed,) studied this question.