Dr. Nagy Adrienne - Dr. Petykó Csilla - Kovács Edina - Kiss Diána Dóra
Budapest Business School Tourism Department
Corvinus University of Budapest
Cities may differ hugely from the point of view of tourism according to size, profile, geographical characteristics and cultural heritage. Professionals agree that city destinations are chosen mainly because of their wide range of free time services and products supply adequate for a wide spectrum of market demand (eturizmus, 2011)
Cities are the headquarters of cultural tourism due to the cultural heritage attractions concentrating in them. According to a common research on European city and cultural tourism published by ETC and UNWTO cities are to be categorised into five groups: small towns with built heritage, small towns with built heritage and art supply, cities with built heritage and art supply, cities with built heritage, art supply and creative industries, metropolises with built heritage, art supply and creative industries.
On this basis Budapest is listed among cities with built heritage, art supply and creative industries. A statement of ETC-UNWTO research important from our point of view is that the role of innovative products and services have come into the foreground in cultural tourism (ETC-UNWTO 2004).
Other researches support this statement on the one hand and add more specific characteristic features to the above mentioned elements. Michalkó, G. and Rátz, T. (2009) assert urban tourism is expected to improve due to the good price value for money going together with concentrated experience.
There is an important factor evidently coming from the secondary literature examined: further development of creative tourism is highly dependent on the initiative idea that creative tourism must be and remain in relation with culture to be realised through creative industries. Creative tourism is looked upon as a third-generation type of tourism with the motivation to have encounters with the local population through personal and creative experiences.
Creative tourism supply seems to be evidently characterised in terms of and shaped according to local features (Barcelona, Paris). Categories hence are determined according to the special supply of the place. Since creative supply is mainly concentrated in cities the UNESCO created the network of Creative Cities in 2004 based on the main concept that culture has got a primary role in innovation and sustainability. Presently 116 cities of 54 countries are members of the network in seven different terrains of culture (literature, cinema, music, craft and folk arts, design, media arts, gastronomy) (UNESCO 2017). From Hungary only Budapest is listed among these cities so far.
To sum up it can be stated that urban tourism is a permanently growing tendency among tourism trends with a strengthening mainline of innovative directions related to cultural tourism.
The main aim of our research which we started in 2014 was the survey of creative supply in urban and creative tourism. The first step was to see whether there really was creative supply in Budapest, capital of Hungary. Unlike widely known researches we did not want to focus on opportunities provided by creative industries but rather on to what extent Budapest urban tourism supply provides creative services where visitors activity and the providers' creativity can be found contributing to experience production and consumption. Luckily we found a wide palette of service that proved adequate material for analysis and made it possible to create categories for further analysis.
It has been proved that there is a significant and permanently growing creative tourism in Budapest contributing to a renewal of tourism supply.
The next phase of our research focuses on the continuation of our previous analysis in two directions. On the one hand we would like to determine what position Budapest occupies in the field of innovative touristic services, especially within the supply of escape rooms. On the other hand, we plan to analyse how well-known these escape rooms have become, in order to attain precise knowledge about the widespreadness of the services mentioned above.
ETC-UNWTO (2004) www.etc-corporate.org
Michalkó, G. and Rátz, T. (Ed.) (2009) A tér vonzásában – a turisztikai termékfejlesztés térspecifikus vonásai. Kodolányi János Főiskola – MTA Földrajztudományi Kutatóintézet – Magyar Földrajzi Társaság, Székesfehérvár-Budapest, 304 p.
eturizmus (2011) download: 31.03.2015.
UNESCO (2017) Creative Cities Network, download: 10.04.2017.
http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/creativity/creative-cities-network/who-are-the-members/
| Subject : | : | paper (presentation) |
| Language of text | : | English |
| Topics | : | 7.2.b. Tourism, economy and regional development II (with the IGU Commissions for Geographies of Tourism, Leisure and Global Change and of the Mediterranean basin) (Ignacio Ruiz Guerra) |
| Keywords | : | innovative touristic products ; creative cities ; creative tourism ; escape rooms ; Budapest |
| PDF version | : |  PDF version |
