The blue - grey transition: heritage in the reinvention of the tourism resort

Tourism destinations reinvent themselves for various reasons ranging from intrinsic characteristics of tourism demand, economic behaviour and attitudes towards environments and local communities. An idea currently popular among the managers of tourism facilities, heritage resources and local places is the shift from coastal resort ‘blue’ tourism to urban heritage ‘grey’ tourism. This article will examine the processes and instruments of such change, the constraints and issues associated with it and the possible scenarios. Various European cases will be used to strengthen, extend and contradict the argument. Tourism destinations reinvent themselves for various reasons. Traditional product life cycle analysis (Butler, 1980) even suggests that all tourism destinations are in necessary continuous process of change, resulting in either decline or reinvention. This article however examines the motives, processes and results of one particular but widespread type of repositioning of tourism destinations, namely the deliberately planned shift from ‘blue’, sea-side resort based tourism to ‘grey‘, heritage based tourism which often includes elements of the ‘green’! ). This involves a fundamental move away from what has been called the 'plain vanilla' sun and sea product (MTA, 2002a) to a tourism product range redefined to rest on the heritage resource. This article explores the answers to the basic questions of motivation (why is change deliberately attempted and, concomitantly, why is present or past success deliberately abandoned? ); the process and thus consequences of such a change; the main conditions for successful transition and, finally, the three scenarios are likely to result. Why change? Trends within tourism demand. The story of the quite spectacular success of Mediterranean coastal resort tourism since the1960s has been related by many observers. For example, Priestley's (1995) account of the emergence and growth of Mediterranean coastal resort tourism, with reference to the product leader viz. the Spanish 'Costas', has been echoed in other destinations around successively the Western Mediterranean, Eastern Mediterranean. The Mediterranean coast resorts were the pioneers and the archetypes but falling travel costs and increasing tourist familiarity and adventurousness have extended blue holiday horizons into the Indian Ocean, Caribbean and beyond. The product characteristics have however remained remarkably unchanged in their main features through both time and space. The successive phases were initiation in the 1950s with the introduction of the inclusive ‘flight + hotel accommodation + some meals’ package, explosive growth in the 1960s based on standardised production and falling costs in ever extending markets, continuing growth through the 1970s/1980s punctuated by some oscillations, reaching in most destinations a plateau at some point in the 1990s and a widespread expectation of at best stability and at worst steady decline. It is worth noting before passing to the arguments for abandoning this phenomenon that it has been highly successful in many ways. In a period of only around 30 years the Mediterranean beach holiday transformed the economies, social expectations, political structures and not least the physical environments of a large part of the world, while