Approaches for sustaining cultural resources by adapting diversified context of customers in tourism: Comparison between Japanese and Slovenian cases

Abstract

Amid changing economic situation rapidly, how to sustain local/cultural resources and distribute their value to many customers is crucial in a number of business communities. In tourism industry, although there are a lot of activities for such struggles, a small number of the global comparison studies are a problem for exploring and adopting the more effective ways worldwide. In this paper, we examine two Japanese cases and one Slovenian case doing well of sustaining and balancing cultural resources in terms of adapting the differences of customers’ context in tourism. In the first case from Japanese tourism spa community “Awazu-onsen”, the key point is a loose relationship between the traditional local hotels and the modern hotel chain. The second case from Kanazawa Creative Tourism in Japan is a NPO supported by the local art universities for connecting the local artists and the local tourism. The third case from the Ana Desetnica International Street Theatre Festival in Slovenia offers not only each street artistic performances simply, but also the unique city Ljubljana as a big theater for attracting many tourists who have a wide variety of touristic preferences. There are three approaches for attracting current customers with sustaining their local values, those are installing a new resources, making a new matching system and reintrepretation of the existing resources. In the future research, it is important to collect related cases by analyzing those countries’ situations, issues, purposes, and the ways and results by more extensive surveys for understanding and making significant theories.