Boutiques hotels and the packaging of 'Asia' for tourist consumption: the spatial and temporal re-imagining of heritage in a cultural World Heritage site

Abstract eng:
World Heritage sites represent landscapes within which the balancing of local needs and aspirations and non-local perceptions and desires must occur. Existing research into cultural heritage tourism has focused predominantly on visitor experiences of the ’public spaces’ of a heritage site and has tended to ignore the role that accommodation and associated lifestyle spaces play as key points of host-visitor interaction. This paper will examine the relationship between boutique accommodation and the values of their associated World Heritage area. Drawing upon observational data and analysis of electronic marketing media, this paper considers the production of boutique hotels and their associated lifestyle consumption spaces within the World Heritage town of George Town, Malaysia. Beyond the traditions of the business hotel, boutique accommodation appears to be increasingly positioned as servicing the creative class and those seeking a more ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ travel experience than that offered by the tools of mass tourism. The recent growth in boutique accommodation, particularly that within the cultural heritage areas of Asia, intensifies the need to consider the role of the hotel as a performative space that potentially enhances visitor experiences of the heritage outside. In this paper we explore how these spaces create and present an imaginative sense of ‘Asia’ that is often in stark contrast to the contemporary context of the places within which they are located. In doing so, we seek to critique and reveal the constructed nature of boutique hotels as discursive spaces which deliberately seek to imaginatively ‘jump scales’ both spatially and temporally. Boutique hotels have become a ubiquitous part of the landscape of World Heritage sites and a critical space through which such sites are imagined, engaged with and consumed. They can thus be positioned as specific sites that embody the tensions between preservation and commodification that bedevil World Heritage sites.

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