Tagungsort Grand Hotel Heiligendamm

Prof. Dr. Sophie Elias-Varotsis,
emeritierte Professorin an der Universität
Paris-Est Créteil
Innovative Strategien dür
die Vermarktung des kulturellen
und touristischen
Erbes einer Destination
Distinguished hosts,
Thank you very much for having me here
and giving me the opportunity of discovering
such a wonderful place: a wonderful hotel, but
also a breathtaking view of your seaside that
I didn’t know. I come from a very different
seaside because originally I come from Australia.
It’s not quite the same thing. We don’t have
as much heritage there. We don’t have as much
heritage architecture either. […] I’m not going
to speak about architecture itself and this is
why I entitled my paper “Innovative Marketing
Strategies and Heritage”. Because I think
that architecture, of course, makes up the heritage,
but heritage goes way beyond. It’s a question
of traditions; it’s a question of culture in
general. And we have to take everything into
account. If we really go back and think about
it, the alliance of tourism and heritage is probably
one of the most prominent paradoxes
that tourism planners and marketers have to
handle. It is perhaps the greatest love-hate
relationship on record. Heritage is essential,
since it provides the destination with its uniqueness
and personality. But heritage is also
controversial as it requires protection and capital
investment to endure, to last, and to keep
its attractiveness. And this often leads to painful
choices as well as disagreements. That’s
why it complicates matters for destination
marketers who are increasingly under pressu-
strategies in keeping with tourists’ quests for
new experiences and experiments.
My presentation therefore aims to open a discussion
on the potential of destinations that
have had great renown, that are still attractive,
but that need to capitalize on this, not only for
themselves, but also to think in terms of re-
around them. Because tourists today are not
looking for single destinations; they’re not
thinking in terms of one location. They are
thinking of discovering many different things.
One of the most frequently quoted captions
when referring to heritage is “(when or where)
times stands still”. And yet time is always on
the move and so is the tourist. Let’s face it:
the mix of seaside resorts and heritage is far
from being obvious in the tourist’s mind. I’ve
been kindly invited to speak about one of your
sister resorts, ‘Deauville’, in France. Not the
in the USA, although there is one in the USA
too. But before doing so, I would like to show
you a sample of other seaside resorts and their
architecture.
This is Deauville and, of course, and if I had
some music, I could put on the music from
“A Man and a Woman” and you would proba-
in Australia, a different type of architecture.
Some of you probably think that it’s dreadful,
but who knows, tastes keep moving on. There
is a certain familiarity between what happened
on the Gold Coast and what’s been done in
traces of it with the new resorts that are developing
in China. Now zeitgeist – sorry for
the pronunciation, I don’t speak German – I
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