Tourist experience of authenticity at Vietnam war sites
Creators: name: Phan, Thi Kim Ngan
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 350605
subject: Marketing management (incl. strategy and customer relations)

description: Authenticity, a concept signifying what is original, real, genuine (Boorstin, 1964; MacCannell, 1973) or what appears real, or is reconstructed as if it were original (Bruner, 1994; Cohen, 1988), is crucial for tourism, especially heritage tourism. The notion of authenticity in heritage tourism, however, is complex and varies among contextual settings as well as among different tourist segments. War site heritages, which are tourist destinations that comprise battlefields, war memorials, war cemeteries, war prisons, and war museums (Prideaux, 2007), offer tourists a contextual setting that provokes differing perceptions of authenticity. Despite the pervasiveness of heritage authenticity in the tourism literature, much less attention has been paid to how authenticity emerges through tourist experience at heritage war sites. The understanding of how authenticity is perceived and constructed by tourists from different cultural backgrounds can contribute to the literature of authenticity. This research seeks to examine the interplay of tourist experience and authenticity to understand how authenticity emerges in war site settings. To do so, it focuses on three interrelated authenticity concepts: war-site authenticity (i.e., the original or realness of the war sites as subjectively perceived by tourists), discourse authenticity (i.e., the trustworthiness of discourses on the contemporary wars in Vietnam) and existential authenticity (i.e., meaningful moments of being when tourists find their true self). The overall aim is to examine how the tourists' experiences at war sites interplay with each one of these types of authenticity. I ask, "How do tourist experiences at war sites shape the construction of authenticity?"

To find responses to this question, I have used Vietnam and Vietnamese war-sites as a fertile context. Vietnam, a country that experienced many brutal and destructive wars, has been emerging as a popular tourist destination in Asia. However, differing responses of tourists visiting Vietnam war sites are identified in the tourism literature. Drawing on the fact that there are different discourses on a war, the thesis provides a contextual understanding of the dominant discourses in connection with the contemporary wars in Vietnam, namely the Indochina War and the American-Vietnam War.

Using qualitative methodology, the research employs observation of the popular war sites in Vietnam and in-depth interviews with tourists who visited war sites in Vietnam. Participants include tourists from Vietnam as well as Western tourists from Australia, New Zealand and America.

 The thesis reveals three interrelated sets of findings. First, this thesis demonstrates that tourists authenticated the war sites in four ways, namely material, cognitive, emotional, and performative authentication. Interestingly, in each way, there were differences in how Vietnamese and Western tourists authenticated the war sites. Second, this thesis shows that tourist experience was influenced by discourses on war, but more importantly, tourist experience at the war sites also shaped the authentication of discourses on war. Third, the findings of this thesis apply the concept of existential authenticity into warfare tourism to explain the tourists' self-actualization, contemplation on meaning in life, personal transformation, and healing in war site settings.