Review of Literature of the Rural Heritage Tourism Destination

¹ School of Housing Building and Planning, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800 Penang, Malaysia
² School of Distance Education, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800 Penang, Malaysia

Abstract

Rural heritage tourism destination management is an essential knowledge area that should be investigated to achieve sustainable destination, especially for an emerging destination. The goal of this process is to ensure that these elements are thoroughly inspected and rigidly organized due to the main concepts, theories, methods and approaches mentioning different perspectives to tackle these certain elements. In order to cope with the complexity of the relation between the destination elements and its characteristics and sequence of the maturity of the selected destination, all that needs in-depth knowledge to assist the researchers in developing and improving different types of approaches and tools, and in structuring and assessing the destination. We develop a neat backbone literature review concerning the all aspects of the sustainable rural heritage tourism destination. We review the existing methods, approaches and theories applied on the relative field, and further study the relevant challenges that have been the target of investigation in the academic literature. The paper is intended to be the newest and the most important existing study on the topic of rural heritage emerging tourism destination. The results are particularly relevant to practitioners seeking a better grasp on managing tourism destination as well as achieving sustainability in tourism destinations. As a major finding of the review, the results strongly suggest the need for more practitioner-oriented and industry-driven empirical studies in the area of flexible managerial framework to cope with special and dynamic characteristics of different tourism destinations.