Place attachment and sustainable behaviour in heritage tourism

This paper focuses on the role of place attachment as an important antecedent of sustainable behaviours of visitors in a heritage destination context. Heritage destinations are places facing important changes, particularly where tourism development challenges their sustainability. The understanding of visitors' place attachments and experiential meanings is crucial for supporting the management of heritage sites in coping with challenges involved in the sustainable development of territories. In spite of the growing research on the role of place attachment in achieving sustainable tourism outcomes, studies on heritage tourism fall short in sufficiently considering the relationship between the visitor and the place visited, and its influence on the sustainable consumption of heritage. This study proposes a conceptual framework that extends the interrelationships between visitors' experience, place attachment and general and site-specific sustainable visitors' behaviours. It adopts a multiphase methodology to investigate how visitors' attachment to heritage sites affect their sustainable behaviour from a demand-based perspective. In the first stage, a qualitative approach based on interviews with visitors at various cultural heritage sites (e.g., museums, archaeological sites, monuments) is adopted. Qualitative findings inform the main survey design for testing the interplay of relationships in the proposed framework in stage two, deepening the understanding of visitors' attachment to heritage sites and its role in the adoption of sustainable practices. Practical and research directions for the sustainable development of heritage tourism are discussed.