Crowding standards at Petra Archaeological Park: a comparative study of McKercher's five types of heritage tourists

ABSTRACT

To achieve sustainability in heritage tourism, tourists should be placed at the heart of the management and planning processes. Indicators and standards-based frameworks were developed in the field of outdoor recreation management to manage and measure crowding and other problematic issues in parks and related areas. Using normative theory and visual research methods, this article aims to examine crowding standards of tourists at Petra Archaeological Park, and compare these standards between the types of heritage tourists suggested by a model developed by Bob McKercher. Results showed that tourists’ acceptability levels go down with an increasing number of tourists, and tourists who are highly motivated to visit heritage sites (i.e. purposeful and sightseeing heritage tourists) had the most restrictive acceptable number of tourists at the park. The normative standards formulated in this article provided a guidance to manage crowding at Petra.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainable heritage tourism
• heritage management
• visitor management
• crowding
• carrying capacity
• indicators and standards
• visual method

Notes on contributors

Dr Mohammad M. Alazaizeh is an assistant professor in the Department of Travel and Tourism Management at University of Jordan. His research interests are currently related to heritage tourism, heritage experience, visitor management frameworks, carrying capacity, tourist behavior, sustainable heritage sites planning and management, heritage values, and community and tourism impacts.

Dr Jeffrey C. Hallo is an associate professor in the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management at Clemson University. His research activities are focused on understanding, planning for, and managing recreational visitor use in parks, forests, and other protected areas.

Dr Sheila J. Backman is a professor in Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management at Clemson University. She has a core research interest in social media and consumer behavior, tourism and virtual worlds, tourism marketing, and events tourism.

Dr William C. Norman is a professor in Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management at Clemson University. His research has focused on community tourism development, leisure travel decision-making, tourism marketing, and the study of niche travel markets (i.e. agritourism, heritage tourism, sport tourism, fisheries tourism, culinary tourism, and nature-based tourism).

Dr Melissa Vogel is an associate professor of anthropology at Clemson University. She has worked at various sites in Latin America since 1995. Her research has focused on archeology of the Americas, urbanism, sex and gender, public interest anthropology, heritage tourism, 3D data visualization, origin and development of complex societies, space and place, religion and ritual, warfare, and archeological theory and method