Tourism is widely considered by academics and practitioners to become the largest global industry. The early post-war massive “sun and sea tourism” formed the first generation of tourism, in which people come to a place for relaxation and leisure. The subsequent alternative forms and mainstream cultural tourism formed the second generation of tourism, where cultural tourism was rather oriented toward museums and cultural tours. Cultural tourism, since it first appeared as a distinct tourism product category in the 80’s, has gone through several stages - both in supply and demand. The initial interest in the symbolic cultural attractions and world capital cities resulted in a phenomenon which Richards and Wilson (2006) [8] call "serial reproduction of culture" or directly recreating the successful models often associated with a large amount of expenses. Exploiting culture for tourism thus became an established tourism destination marketing tool worldwide, including literary tourism and trails, architecture tours and branding (Evans 2007) [9] .
However, as cultural tourism becomes more diverse but at the same time more standardized, the necessity of maintaining distinction while promoting tourism in post-modern society has led to a renewed process of cultural branding. Increasingly, the focus shifts to personalized tourist experience, search for authentic atmosphere, specific character of the visited place, with predominance of intangible elements of cultural supply e.g. traditions, way of life, over the material ones. Over the past decade, tourism businesses have been trying to meet this new demand by emphasizing on local products that have the potential to become a unique selling proposition. Cities and regions are now developing local creative industries and pioneer cultural entrepreneurship that could precede creative tourism to attract an extensive array of rising creative tourism markets. A typical example is Italy, which has been successfully marketed as a gourmet destination focusing on local traditional cuisine and lifestyle. A number of developing countries also base their tourism policy on the local culture.
[8] Richards, G. & Wilson, J. (2006) Developing creativity in tourist experiences: A solution to the serial reproduction of culture?, Tourism Management, 27 (2006) 1209–1223
[9] Evans, G. (2007) Creative Spaces, Tourism and the City. In Tourism, Creativity and Development; Richards, G., Wilson, J., Eds.; Routledge: Oxon, UK, pp. 57–72.