Technology and Cultural Heritage Management: Can Technology Have an Impact on Word-of-Mouth and Territorial Attractiveness?

Abstract

The main aim of this chapter is to explore the existence of a bond that tied together the satisfaction of a cultural heritage’ visitors (after the experience of the technological visits), their propensity towards the word-of-mouth and their intention to discover the local territory in which the cultural attraction is located. To achieve this purpose, a theoretical review was carried out, in order to analyze the existing literature on cultural tourism and relative flows, visitors’ satisfaction, word-of-mouth, and destination management. Nowadays, the cultural visit is changing and a wide number of sites provide to their customers the possibility to experiment a “technological visit.” Starting from the results of the literature analysis, a theoretical model was developed with the following objectives: (a) detecting the main aspects that impact on the visitors’ satisfaction; (b) understanding the relation between the visitors’ satisfaction and the word-of-mouth (WOM) inherent to a cultural site; (c) identifying the existence of positive relation between the WOM and the willingness to come back to discover the local territory. Many authors studied the factors that affect visitors’ satisfaction, but only few researches have been oriented to deep analyze the specific role played by the technological applications along the cultural path. In addition, the literature on cultural tourism shows a lack in the analysis of the tourists’ satisfaction ability to generate a positive WOM, in turn able to increase the attractiveness of the territory in an important way. To verify the developed model, a survey on the visitors of the Etruscan Necropolises of Cerveteri was carried out. The presented cultural site is part of the Cultural and Technology District (CTD) of Lazio region and providing the possibility to experiment a technological visit, allows the study of this new feature on visitors’ satisfaction. The model was test by using a structural equations modeling (SEM).