Intangible cultural heritage as a peak touristic experience in Sri Lanka

Intangible cultural heritage has been long recognised as a tourism resource. Nevertheless, its experiential significance remains underrepresented in academic literature. As a contribution to this knowledge gap, this paper set out to firstly, explore characteristics of intangible cultural heritage experiences, and then, to draw on those characteristics to ascertain its significance as a tourist experience. For this, we used Quan and Wang’s structural model of the tourist experience as the theoretical lens. Set within the context of European inbound travellers’ experiences in Sri Lanka, our findings present that as a tourist experience, intangible cultural heritage increases memorability by eliciting the characteristics of uniqueness, impressiveness, authenticity, and a sense of self-discovery. It also induces motivation by promoting completeness of the journey, facilitating cultural exploration, and generating curiosity. These findings present intangible cultural heritage as a peak touristic experience, contributing to the discussions on its significance to tourism from an experiential perspective.