Marketing World Heritage Sites: A Case Study of Product Rejuvenation and Promotion of World Heritage Sites in India

Practically, every nation packages its history and heritage as a tourism product to attract international tourists and simultaneously adopts promotional strategies. The UNESCO's policy of declaring certain historical sites as World Heritage Sites has not only helped in the conservation of local history and monuments but has provided a major boost to promote such sites as something unique and special whose importance is reflected because of the site being declared as World Heritage Site. A prominent feature of this policy has been the achievement of worldwide prominence for local and national sites. India, with its extremely rich History and Culture, today has 29 World Heritage Sites whereas many more remain in the queue for achieving that status. All these sites have been major tourist attractions for both domestic as well as international tourism and in many cases even before they were given the World Heritage status.

This paper attempts to analyse the aspects related to product rejuvenation for these sites in terms of their marketing and promotional strategies. It also discusses the threats and obstacles faced in the promotion of these sites with emphasis on international marketing. It was also attempted to compare between the cities of Agra and Delhi, with the former having the Taj Mahal, Agra Fort and nearby Fatehpur Sikri while the later having the Red Fort, Qutab Minar and Humayun Tomb. It is expected that the SWOT analysis carried out in this paper will be beneficial for all players in the heritage tourism sector, i.e., the local communities, tourists, national governments and segments of the tourism industry.

The author is the Chairperson, Faculty of History, Indira Gandhi National Open University New Delhi, India. Formerly, he was also the Programme Co-ordinator for Tourism and Hospitality Programmes and Research.