Creating a New Tourism? Greg Richards Richards, G. (2002) Creating a new tourism? In Garcia, S. (ed.) Turisme i Cultura. Debats del. Congrés de Turisme Cultural SITC. Fundacio Interarts, Barcelona Introduction Cultural tourism has been one of the main elements of European tourism for a very long time. The thirst for knowledge and new experiences has been a driving force for tourists since the Grand Tour. The current popularity of cultural tourism as a major market segment in Europe has stimulated considerable development of new cultural tourism products in recent years. Cities and rural areas alike have seen culture as some kind of holy grail that will deliver their dream of upmarket, highly cultured, high spending visitors. In particular, cultural tourism has been identified as one of the leading elements of the ‘new tourism’ a flexible, culturally sensitive and environmental friendly style of tourism that Poon (1993) asserts is replacing the ‘old’ mass tourism. There is no doubt that cultural tourism is everywhere these days. There is hardly a region in Europe that is not active in the cultural tourism business. Spain and Catalonia are no exceptions in this regard. This event is already the second analysis of cultural tourism to be held in Barcelona in a year, and similar conferences have been held in La Rioja and Valladolid recently. This flurry of activity inevitably attracts attention. Just like the cultural tourists themselves, the cultural tourism policy-makers tend to assume that something that is popular must be good. The ideal restaurant to visit is one crowded with local people. The question that remains unasked, however, is why are they there? Are they there because the food is so good, or because everybody else is there too? So we tend to end up with look-alike cultural tourism policies focussed on very similar cultural attractions. Every city needs to have its museum of modern art, a concert hall, an opera house. This form of serial monotony increases the existing competitive climate and saturates the cultural market with products that are not necessarily desired by the cultural tourist. Now that the Guggenheim has developed outposts in Berlin and Bilbao, cities are standing in line for a ‘McGuggenheim’ franchise. Over 60 cities have indicated an interest in becoming franchisees, and it is likely that the existing outlets will soon be joined by new museums in Las Vegas, Rio de Janeiro, Venice and St. Petersburg as well as a third Guggenheim in New York (Honigsbaum, 2001). Just as in the fast food market, increasing economies of scale and scope are evident in the cultural tourism market. The Guggenheim network expects to welcome 6 million visitors worldwide after the Las Vegas opening, compared with only 350,000 in 1989. Not only are the numbers of cultural attractions growing, but the major museums tend to be capturing a larger and larger share of the total market. These problems are encouraging some destinations to look for new types of cultural tourism, to develop untapped market niches. Culture and Creativity One of the problems of surviving in the global cultural tourism marketplace at present is the fact that major investments are usually thought necessary to compete. You either need to be a city that has a vast stock of cultural resources built up over centuries, or you need to be able to buy a custom-made cultural icon, such as Bilbao has done. Cities that are unable to compete in the cultural tourism market on the basis of their store of culture and heritage are looking to develop their creative resources instead. Creative resources