Enhancing visitor experience with war heritage tourism through information and communication technologies: evidence from Spanish Civil War museums and sites

ABSTRACT

War tourism is increasingly capturing the interest of both visitors and scholars. Notwithstanding, academic research has paid little attention to the use of technology in visitor experience co-creation in war heritage tourism sites so far. The present paper aims to gain an understanding of tourist experience through personal reflections held by visitors of war museums, historical sites, and visitor interpretive centers. Comments posted in one of the main online review sites of travel-related services by visitors of these war heritage centers specialized in the Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 have been analyzed in order to provide insight into the emotions of the visitor experiences, and usefulness of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) as facilitators of visitor experience co-creation through eliciting emotions. From the evidence obtained from qualitative research, ICT solutions stand out as a useful tool to engage visitors in experience co-creation in war heritage tourism sites and encourage spontaneous positive electronic word-of-mouth communications. This study provides a first insight about the potentiality of technology to enhance the post-visit cognitive and emotional impact of war heritage tourism sites that may inspire further research evaluating the contribution of ICT to co-create the war heritage visitor experience through on-site data collection using an experimental and/or correlational approach.

KEYWORDS:

• War heritage tourism
• visitor experience
• information and communication technology
• Spanish Civil War
• big data

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

José Alabau-Montoya is a researcher at the Instituto de Estudios Conquenses (IDEC), Spain. His area of interest is cultural heritage and dark tourism.

María-Eugenia Ruiz-Molina is Associate Professor at the Universitat de Valencia, Spain. Her main research areas are tourism marketing, innovation and sustainability.