Experiential tourism and community narratives: Non-Tourist Guidebook of Ussita
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17561/ree.n2.2024.8869Keywords:
Tourist experience, community narratives, non tourism guidebookAbstract
In recent decades, experiential tourism studies have developed strongly within a transforming tourism development paradigm. The enhancement of the territory is more focused on its intangible resources, and experience becomes a strategic concern within a renewed way of practicing tourism where individuals look primarily for what to experience. Tourism becomes an opportunity to create and exchange experiences by challenging conventional tourism practices and advocating new value references and new forms of tourism including experiential tourism. This article will focus on the relationship between experiential tourism and community narratives: the Non tourism Project, and particularly the Non tourism Guidebook of Ussita, a small Italian municipality in an inland area and an earthquake victim, will be presented. Non tourism is a way of understanding the encounter between a community and those from outside: the non tourist seeks an intimate and authentic relationship with a territory and the community rediscovers its identity through a collective narrative.
The paper aims to investigate whether community narratives can help transform tourism into an enriching and meaningful experience, creating deep bonds between tourists and the places they visit, promoting sustainability, and enhancing local cultural heritage. The non-tourist guide, as a result of the local community’s collective storytelling experience, brings tourists closer to experiential ways of visiting and has enabled the local community to rediscover its identity through the use of narrative practices. This article aims to highlight how non-tourist guides can also be a tool for dialogue between tourists and the community through the proposal of experiential itineraries. The experience of non-tourist guides is purely Italian and is at an early but interesting stage of diffusion, with volumes covering both urban contexts and smaller and inland territories. The article is the result of an initial exploratory work (Yin, 2017) that offered a preliminary understanding of the opportunity that non-tourist guides have to promote sustainability, enhancing local resources and offering significant benefits to both tourists and host communities.
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