Tourism Review 3+4/07 20.11.

2007 10:58 Uhr Seite 53

K. Lindroth, J. Ritalahti, T. Soisalon-Soininen: Creative Tourism in Destination Development

Creative Tourism in Destination Development

K A I J A L I N D R O T H , J A R M O R I TA L A H T I
& TUOVI SOISALON-SOININEN

1st submission: January 8, 2007

Accepted: September 6, 2007

Abstract Purpose – The aim of this article is to identify the stakeholders’ attitudes, values and feelings on desti-
nation development in the framework of creative tourism.
Design/methodology/approach – The research questions focus on tourist participation, innovative
partnership, guest-host meetings and money spent in the destination. The focus group method with
snowball sampling was chosen as the research method.
Findings – Central outcomes can be divided into ten different categories: socio-physical environment of
the destination, service structure, consumer behaviour, information and communication technologies, traf-
fic, logistics and accessibility, networking, tourism demand and supply, local resources, marketing and PR.
Research limitations/implications – Although focus group research has many advantages, there are
limitations. In this case the moderators did not have full control all the time due to the more topical
themes that interested the participants; focus group research is often open-ended.
Practical implications – The whole issue of the present case revolves around the question why destina-
tions want to be creative or why they need to be creative in the present competitive situation. Creativity
should be an integral part of the tourism offering just as tourism is an integral part of the planning and
development of a destination.
Originality/value – It can be concluded that the future issues and research topics seem to focus on five
themes. Most of what was said can be ascribed to the need for a forum for decision makers and tourism
actors to discuss holistic and long-term planning of tourism in the destination.

Keywords: Creative thinking, Tourism development, Networking, Consumer behaviour

Paper type: Research paper

1 Introduction Contemporary societies are moving to-
wards an economy where cultural compe-
tence together with human and organisa-
tional creativity acts as the driving force.
Creativity and innovation are seen as key
Kaija Lindroth components in company and destination
Phone: +358-9-2296 5685 management strategies. Organisations are
Fax: +358-9-2296 5655 slowly getting rid of the old belief that cre-
E-mail: kaija.lindroth@haaga-helia.fi ativity and business are contradictory
forces. Combining creativity, a prerequisite
Jarmo Ritalahti for product and service development, with
Phone: +358-9-2296 5622 business activity is what brings results in
Fax: +358-9-2296 5655 today’s economy (Pine and Gilmore, 1999;
E-mail: jarmo.ritalahti@haaga-helia.fi Florida, 2002).
Strategy planners see the potential for
Tuovi Soisalon-Soininen developing the creative sector in order to
Phone: +358-9-2296 5621 enhance the competitiveness of the region.
Fax: +358-9-2296 5655 Simultaneously, measures are being taken
E-mail: tuovi.soisalon-soininen@haaga-helia.fi to bridge the needs of the actors represent-
ing the cultural and the tourism sector re-
HAAGA-HELIA University of Applied Sciences spectively. Therefore, it is necessary to iden-
Aleksanterinkatu 20 tify the existing situation in regional
06100 Porvoo, Finland tourism co-operation.
The aim of this paper is to identify the
stakeholders’ attitudes, values and feelings
on destination development in the frame-
work of creative tourism. Further aims are
to identify innovative partnerships, gener-
ate new product ideas and identify the exis-
tence and possibilities of creative tourism.
The case study deals with the town of Por-
voo in Finland. Porvoo is a cultural desti-
nation with a mediaeval cathedral and
town plan, 50 km east of Helsinki, the cap-
ital of Finland. The research was conduct-
ed under the umbrella of the KUTUR pro-
ject which focused on the role of heritage
tourism in resort development. The KU-
TUR project was financed with Interreg II-
IA funds. Within the same project a com-
parative study was carried out in the town
of Pärnu in Estonia.
The town of Porvoo has about 47,000
inhabitants and an area of 654 km2. It is the
centre of the Eastern Uusimaa province. Por-
voo is a bilingual town with about 33 per cent

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Tourism Review 3+4/07 20.11.2007 10:58 Uhr
Refereed Section
of the inhabitants speaking Swedish as their
mother tongue. More than half of the citi-
zens of Porvoo gain their livelihood from
trade and services. The traditions and the
structure of industry and commercial life are
based on three industrial branches – the
graphics, electro-technical, and petrochemi-
cal industries. Porvoo originally grew up as a
trade centre and it continues to be a centre of
business and commerce in the region.
Porvoo is an attractive tourist destina-
tion and the importance of tourism is con-
siderable both for the retail trade and the
service sector. The Old Town provides one of
its most colourful sights and tourist attrac-
tions. Old Porvoo is famous for its narrow
lanes and brick-coloured riverside ware-
houses. In the Neoclassic-style part of the
town, the low wooden houses belong to the
classical town plan. Porvoo has long tradi-
tions as a tourist venue. Kings and tsars,
popes and bourgeois, artists and pilgrims
travelled along the King’s road from Turku
to Porvoo, and all the way to Vyborg already
as early as the fourteenth century. Still today
Porvoo is an idyllic and, on the Finnish scale,
unique resort that attracts both domestic
and international visitors. The most popu-
lar place for visits in Porvoo is by far Old
Porvoo and the mediaeval Cathedral therein
(the third most popular church in Finland
as measured by number of visitors). The
home museum of the national poet J.L.
Runeberg, opened after large restoration
works again in February 2004, is also one of
our most popular attractions. In addition to
Old Porvoo and the places in the centre of
Porvoo, the archipelago (e.g. archipelago
cruises, summer markets, outdoor recre-
ation areas) as well as the countryside (e.g.
manors, domestic animal courtyards, and
nature trails) attracts visitors and second
home owners.
2 Creativity
Creativity, as all phenomena, can be de-
fined in a variety of ways. The Oxford English
Dictionary defines the concept of creativity
as being “inventive, imaginative; showing
imagination as well as routine skill”. A fit-
ting definition for this article dealing with
micro-entrepreneurs comes from Char-
trand (1990) who defines individual cre-
ativity as something that occurs when an
individual steps beyond traditional ways of
doing, knowing and making. According to
Schumpeter (in Juutilainen, 2005) innova-
54
Seite 54
tion is closely linked to entrepreneurship as
an entrepreneur is a person full of ideas,
and with an ability to inspire other people.
Furthermore, an entrepreneur refuses to
see limits to business operations.
Pine and Gilmore (1999) have described
the change that has taken place in the eco-
nomic offering over the decades. Goods and
services are not enough. Instead, customers
want experiences to the extent that the term
“experience economy” has been in wide use
for quite some time already. If the key at-
tribute of services was that of customisa-
tion, experiences required a personal touch.
Pine and Gilmore described the shift from
experience economy to transformation
economy with individual aspirations as the
key attribute. This calls for creativity from
the service producers and forces them to
look for new ways of creating offerings to
meet the needs of customers.
In his book The Rise of the Creative Class,
Florida (2002) discusses the creative class
whose role in society is becoming increas-
ingly central. What links these people is
that they have a solid educational back-
ground with human capital and their work
is about problem solving. They are paid for
creating something new. This new creative
class appreciates creative environments and
seeks the company of other creative people.
All in all, creativity is strongly linked with a
certain social environment.
The creative class is, according to Flori-
da (2002), affecting the competitive advan-
tage of regions. Any region with a concen-
tration of the members that can be included
in the creative class has a competitive advan-
tage over regions with a different popula-
tion mix. Florida proved that areas with a
high concentration of the creative class also
tend to be centres of innovation and high-
tech industry. This has shifted the focus of
economic activity from industrial centres to
new axes of creativity and innovation.
In the findings of an international
study on Creative Spaces: Strategies for
Creative Cities, Graeme Evans (Atlas, 2005)
notes, for example the following emerging
themes: The creative industries are now
universally identified as an economic clus-
ter world-wide. They are also commonly
added to the leading edge or growth sectors
such as financial services, ICT, hi-tech,
biotech, signifying the existing strength
and potential of the regional economy.
There is increased collaboration between
creative industries sectors – but the greatest
scope for growth and innovation exists be-
tween the creative industries and other sec-
tors. Mechanisms used to meet these
growth objectives include provision and
protection of property and premises or
workshops for artists and creative produc-
tion. Business development, advice and
network-building are equally important.
Key issues arising from the Creative
Spaces global scan show that it is often the
relationship between large firms and small-
er enterprises that produces innovative
products and services. Institutional finance
neither is geared towards the micro-enter-
prise or cluster, nor understands the distri-
bution of risk and value chains operating
within the creative industries.
The involvement of artists and creative
industry firms in policy development, gov-
ernance and economic development pro-
grammes, including tourism development,
destination marketing and management, al-
so requires working models of good prac-
tice, since this element is often absent in the
more dependent/emerging creative clusters.
The Confederation of Finnish Indus-
tries EK presents the future challenges of
successful business operations in their re-
port (2005b) as follows:
1. managing innovation: combining diverse
knowledge, integrating business and in-
novation, fast product development and
commercialisation cycles
2. customer orientation: holistic offering, bet-
ter knowledge of the customer, customer
relationship management, tailor-made ser-
vices, knowledge of the target market
3. strategic management: know-how/exper-
tise management and development,
know-how/expertise of network, partner
organisations, enhanced creativity
The fact that the customer is involved in
the production of services and service inno-
vation can be seen as one of the basic char-
acteristics of innovation within the service
sector. Innovations are the result of the
learning process of the service producer and
the customer. Therefore it may sometimes
be hard to define whether it is the service
producer or the customer company that is
accountable for the innovation (EK, 2005a).
Juutilainen (2005) shows evidence of the
fact that micro-entrepreneurs in the tourism
business in Finland value the possibility to
utilise creativity, curiosity and problem-solv-
ing skills in their daily work. The different
types of micro entrepreneurs she describes
all share this ability for new applications,
whereas some of them are able to innovate
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K. Lindroth, J. Ritalahti, T. Soisalon-Soininen: Creative Tourism in Destination Development
more effectively than others. She concludes,
though, that innovations in the service
sector are more difficult to perceive than
technical innovations. The experiences of
tourists and other customers of service busi-
nesses do not always profit from big innova-
tions but from simple, creative solutions.
3 Creative tourism
According to Cooper, Fletcher, Fyall, Gilbert
& Wanhill (2005) “most tourism through-
out the world is a leisure activity”. Distinc-
tions between tourism, recreation and
leisure are slowly fading in the postmodern
world. It is difficult to differentiate between
tourists and participants in other forms of
recreation. Tourism and recreation offer-
ings take place in the same facilities and
compete for customers’ use of money and
time. “Leisure is the time available for doing
as one chooses for enjoyment, well-being
and personal growth and satisfaction” (Wall
and Mathieson, 2006). From this definition
it is easy to draw parallels with the definition
of creative tourism.
Creative tourism was first defined by
Richards and Raymond as an extension or a
reaction to cultural tourism. According to
them, creative tourism was “tourism which
offers visitors the opportunity to develop
their creative potential through active par-
ticipation in learning experiences which are
characteristic of the holiday destination
where they are undertaken” (Richards and
Raymond, 2000).
They see creative tourism as something
active, involving tourists in self-develop-
ment. This need for learning can be focused
on versatile local activities, enabling the use
of local skills. This not only generates rev-
enue in the host communities but also of-
fers meaningful contact between hosts and
guests (Richards, 2005).
Smith (2005) discusses the increasing
importance of creativity in the develop-
ment of cities and destinations. According
to her, traditional heritage sites as such will
not be enough in today’s keen competition.
Furthermore, the destination may not even
have enough heritage attractions to pro-
mote but needs to shift focus on develop-
ing contemporary tourism products based
on the idea of creative tourism.
In their discussion on creative tourism,
Richards and Wilson (2005) highlight the
role of lifestyle entrepreneurs, who tend to
choose rural settings with established cre-
Tourism Review, Vol 62, No 3+4/2007
Seite 55
ative communities for their operations.
The creative and imaginative capital of the
respective locations tends to pave the way
for successful tourism businesses.
Richards (2005) sees as the main drivers
of creative tourism the standardized nature
of products, on the one hand, and modern
man’s need for self-development, on the
other hand. But he argues that the genera-
tors of creative tourism tend to be creative
producers rather than tourists. From a des-
tination point of view the cons of creative
tourism are obvious: the meaningful con-
tact between hosts and guests can be trans-
formed into economic gain as locals are
needed to teach the tourists whatever local
skills they are eager to pursue. This way the
leakages of the local economy can be cut off.
To do this successfully Richards (2005)
emphasises that on the destination level it
is of utmost importance to find the linkage
between the resources of the destination
and the needs of the tourists. Only this
combination can successfully bridge sup-
ply and demand.
Creativity and the outcome of creative
processes, innovation, require the right envi-
ronment and sufficient time resources. Fur-
thermore, ability to co-operate and commu-
nicate is a prerequisite for creativity. A cre-
ative organisation is marked by certain in-
formality, good team spirit and
management trust in the competence of the
personnel (Wilenius, 2004). According to
Håkansson and Snehota (1995), mobilising
various different actors of a company and de-
veloping co-operative attitudes and mecha-
nisms in that interaction with others seem to
be critical in destination development.
According to Clare A. Gunn (1994) re-
gional tourism development that includes
physical and programme development of at-
tractions, service-facilities, transportation,
and promotion-information depends upon
increased participation and involvement of
tourists and visitors to destination activities.
The growing participation expands the sup-
ply and the capacity of the existing physical
places and establishments. The expanded
supply depends upon resource development
that can be presented in the following list:
abundant natural and cultural resources, vi-
able service communities, easy access, ongo-
ing tourism reputation, favourable develop-
ment image, local acceptance of tourism,
favourable government controls and avail-
able land, management, labour and finance.
Traditionally tourism planning and de-
velopment has been in the hands of munici-
pal tourist offices. This is also the case in
Porvoo. However, destination management
was reorganised in 2005 when a private com-
pany took over the responsibility for joint
marketing activities. Today this company
mainly caters for groups and the municipal
tourist office serves individual visitors.
So far elements of creative industries have
not been much utilised in the local tourism
offer. The large number of creative people liv-
ing and working in the area (musicians, writ-
ers, actors, painters, sculptors etc.) could play
a role in the explicit visitor experience.
Furthermore, creative elements could
also be brought into the destination devel-
opment and management work in order to
guarantee success in the ever increasing
competition between destinations.
4 Methodology
The aim of this paper is to identify the stake-
holders’ attitudes, values and feelings on des-
tination development in the framework of
creative tourism. Further aims are to identify
innovative partnerships, generate new prod-
uct ideas and identify the existence and pos-
sibilities of creative tourism. The case studies
in this research are located in the towns of
Pärnu in Estonia and Porvoo in Finland.
The basis of the research questions rose
from the fact that the needs of visitors are
changing and the competition between
destinations is growing. How to make the
demand and supply in the destinations
meet? The research questions focus on
tourist participation, innovative partner-
ship, guest-host meetings and money spent
in the destination. To answer these research
questions the focus group method was cho-
sen as a research method.
The focus group has been defined as a
“carefully planned series of discussions de-
signed to obtain perceptions on a defined
area of interest in a permissive, non-threat-
ening environment” (Krueger and Casey,
2000; Grudens-Schuck et al., 2004a).
The main purpose of focus group re-
search is to draw upon respondents’ atti-
tudes, feelings, beliefs, experiences and re-
actions. These attitudes, feelings and be-
liefs may be partially independent of a
group or its social setting, but are more
likely to be revealed via the social gathering
and the interaction which being in a focus
group entails (Gibbs, 1997).
Focus groups can provide trustworthy
naturalistic data that also lead to important
55
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Refereed Section
insights about human behaviour, but they
are not set up to generalize in the same way
as survey research (Fern, 2001; Grudens-
Schuck et al., 2004b). Focus groups create in-
formation on participants’ attitudes and
values (Lutenbacher, Cooper and Faccia
2002) that can be used to identify solutions
for old and new problems. Group interac-
tion can stimulate participant ideas that
might not have been available on an individ-
ual basis (Grudens-Schuck et al., 2004a).
Another advantage of focus groups to
participants is that they can become a fo-
rum for change (Race et al., 1994), both dur-
ing the focus group meeting itself and af-
terwards (Gibbs, 1997).
Although focus group research has
many advantages, as with all research meth-
ods there are limitations. Some can be over-
come by careful planning and moderating,
but others are unavoidable and peculiar to
this approach. The researcher, or moderator,
for example, has less control over the data
produced (Morgan, 1988) than in either
quantitative studies or one-to-one inter-
viewing. The moderator has to allow partic-
ipants to talk to one another, ask questions
and express doubts and opinions, while hav-
ing very little control over the interaction
other than generally keeping participants
focused on the topic. By its nature focus
group research is open-ended and cannot be
entirely predetermined (Gibbs, 1997).
As a sampling method for this research
the snowball-method was chosen. In prac-
tice it was not a pure but more a partial
snowball because in order to get working fo-
cus groups the moderators chose to leave
out active stakeholders and involve artists
for example. The reason for a minor selec-
tion of participants was the need to hear
new voices and ideas and not to have a con-
flict between private and public sector rep-
resentatives. Altogether five focus groups
were conducted during the period between
March and June in 2006. The number of par-
ticipants varied from five to 20. The focus
group interviews lasted from two to three
hours and were recorded and transcribed.
The data were analysed using the con-
stant comparative analysis, which can be re-
garded as a general approach in qualitative
analytic strategies. It was originally developed
for use in the grounded theory methodology
of Glaser and Strauss in the late 1960s. “This
strategy involves taking one piece of data and
comparing it with all others that may be sim-
ilar or different in order to develop conceptu-
alisations of the possible relations between
56
Seite 56
various pieces of data” (Thorne, 2000, p. 69).
During the analysis process the data were cat-
egorized according to the general topics that
emerged from them.
5 Research outcomes
The central outcomes of focus group dis-
cussions can be divided into ten different
categories: socio-physical environment of
the destination, service structure, con-
sumer behaviour, information and com-
munication technologies, traffic, logistics
and accessibility, networking, tourism de-
mand and supply, local resources, market-
ing and PR.
The outcomes of the socio-physical en-
vironment concerned in both cases the
need for holistic planning, open decision-
making process, municipal involvement
and investments. Furthermore there was
fear of a too fragmented destination. On a
minor scale the environmental challenges
in the destinations varied from the lack of
street lamps to the need of parking places
for entrepreneurs in front of their shops. In
the focus group discussions about the ser-
vice structure, seasonality of tourism was
one of the key issues. In both towns the
peak season is summer. Tourism in the
shoulder seasons has been encouraged but
is limited to certain weeks and seasons dur-
ing the year. Another time-related question
is the opening hours of the shops and oth-
er facilities. There is an ever-lasting dis-
agreement between the shopkeepers and
the other actors in the industry. The shop-
keepers think that their services are avail-
able when needed while most of the other
actors, who refer to the comments of visi-
tors and their own experiences, would pre-
fer longer opening hours. For the shop-
keepers it is a question of resources and
willingness to hire extra help. All the stake-
holders would like to see more local people
as customers in the old town.
In consumer behaviour the major issues
were increased individual needs of visitors
and a demand for quality products. Con-
sumers are also willing to pay for good and
attractive products. The question was very
often how demand and supply could be bet-
ter met. Porvoo can be described as a day-
tripper destination with a high share of ex-
press tourists. The service providers won-
dered if the visitors have time to spend mon-
ey during their short visits to the town.
Information and communication technolo-
gies should be exploited more and in a better
way than they have so far. The customers
must have opportunities to search for infor-
mation, make reservations and purchases on
the internet. Wireless connection should be
available all over the town. Up to date infor-
mation should be accessible on the way to
the resorts. There was a strong linkage be-
tween the ICT solutions and logistics espe-
cially when it concerned the parking and
signposting. Accessibility itself was not
found to be a problem but concerning traffic
the issues were alternative modes of trans-
port and pedestrian zones in the old town.
Networking, which is one of the key is-
sues in creative tourism, was a kind of nat-
ural starting-point in the focus group dis-
cussions. Networking was preferred and
promoted but there seemed to be challenges
in this very basic activity of tourism busi-
ness. Who has the responsibility for organis-
ing the networking and who would be the
actors in different networks? There was also
a continuous demand for systematic ways of
working. The tourism entrepreneurs were
quite critical against themselves because
they realised that they always expected out-
side coordinators for network operations.
Networking was also one theme in discus-
sions about tourism demand and supply.
The focus groups talked about regional
tourism products that could be character-
ized as authentic and themed chain prod-
ucts with several suppliers under the same
“umbrella”. The continuous product devel-
opment must be customer-orientated.
Local resources in tourism activities
were perhaps a bit abstract for the intervie-
wees. It seemed that they were and are tak-
en for granted. In the Porvoo case the most
important resources according to the focus
groups were the river, archipelago and rail-
way, which is no longer in everyday use.
Other resources mentioned were the local
history and culture as well as the different
architectural layers of the town.
In the discussions around marketing
and PR the themes approached the ones of
the ICT. The stakeholders proposed an elec-
tronic tourist card and its possibilities in af-
ter-sales. There was a wish for a user-friend-
ly and selling web site and a reminder that
all the product providers and other actors in
tourism are marketers of the destination.
The issues described above were more
general in the framework of creative
tourism. Table I shows how the elements of
the creative tourism can be described in Old
Porvoo.
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K. Lindroth, J. Ritalahti, T. Soisalon-Soininen: Creative Tourism in Destination Development

Table I: The elements of the creative tourism in old Porvoo
Experience Present situation
Tourist Tourists want to par- Tourists look for
participation ticipate in simple every- experiences
day tasks with some
nostalgic elements
Innovative Diverse actors, long Too little time for co- Joint product pack-
partnership distances, organisa- operation, need for ages, envy, short-sight-
tion of co-operation outside co-ordinator ed attitude towards
Money Limited opening Old town busy in day
spent hours, groups don’t time and summer,
locally have time for shop- dependency on cruise
ping, tourists have tourists
money and they are
ready to use it for
quality products
Guest-host No comments Difficult to meet
meetings local people in
evenings and winter
6 Discussion
The whole issue of the present case revolves
around the question why destinations want
to be creative or why they need to be cre-
ative in the present competitive situation.
Creativity should be an integral part of
tourism offering just as tourism is an inte-
gral part of a destination for the following
reasons: it generates important economic
inputs, it is heavily dependent on a thriving
cultural supply, and the exchange of people
also generates the exchange of ideas. Fur-
thermore, the success of tourism in a desti-
nation is heavily based on a successful des-
tination image.
Creativity is attractive for tourism be-
cause it enhances that certain atmosphere
which both locals and visitors appreciate. It
also feeds on people’s need for self-develop-
ment and helps avoid problems of heritage
burnout and serial reproduction (Richards,
2006).
The demand for cultural tourism is
based on increased interest in culture as
such, the cultural capital that has been
made more transparent, the ageing popula-
tion that has more time to consume cul-
ture, and the present consumption styles
like short breaks and mixed products. In
the destinations cultural tourism products
are favoured as they are considered a good
form of tourism, providing the destina-
tions with more jobs, income, image, and
wards this approach seemed very positive
and opportunities could be seen opening
Conflicts/challenges Solution during the focus group discussions. The
participants also began to discern some el-
Use of local culture Products where ements of it in the existing offering and had
and history in product tourists can take part,
a positive attitude to the increased require-
development cultural products
with local connection ments of extended cooperation.
The need for new investment is another
Systematic innovation, issue. This does not necessarily mean new
work and product de- physical structures but can take the form of
velopment, open
new networks including new types if actors
co-operation, need minds, co-operation
for joint responsibility with culture actors are outside the traditional realm of
for co-operation tourism. With more participants represent-
ing various sectors of the creative industries
Micro businesses More local business, it is possible to make a shift towards re-
with limited resources, extended visits, prod-
shaping the destination profile and mak-
does the present sup- ucts that involve sev-
ply meet the needs of eral locations/venues ing better use of all the intangible elements
the visitors?, increased of culture in tourism product development
individual needs and destination management. This is high-
lighted in Figure 1.
The results of the focus group discus-
New phenomenon Meet the Porvoo-
people-product sions support this wider concept of actors
as it will eventually lead into a growth in
events, design and media tourism, and en-
hanced use of the existing local potential. It
atmosphere. All of this helps combat the may be challenging even for tourism pro-
competition and fund cultural experiences fessionals to understand the need for this
that would be hard to fund for locals only. new type of offering and the market can
The challenges are plentiful, though. still be seen as marginal. The question of
New skills are needed in creative tourism as how to reach the dispersed target group for
the relationship between the producer and this type of creative product adds to the list
consumer is getting more blurred. The re- of challenges.
sults of the case study in Porvoo showed One of the central elements of creative
that there is little awareness of the concept tourism, the guest-host relationship, was
of creative tourism but that attitudes to- not discussed as such but there was a re-
Figure 1: Collaboration between tourism and cultural and creative actors. (Richards, 2006)

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Refereed Section
quest for a living centre that would tempt
both visitors and local people to meet in
everyday events. It is also important for the
shopkeepers of the old town to widen the
clientele from the visitors of the summer
and some weekends during the rest of the
year to the local consumers with the year-
round purchasing options.
Looking at all this in the light of the
case results it can be concluded that the fu-
ture issues and research topics in the case of
Porvoo seem to focus on four themes: a fo-
rum for cooperation, traffic and parking
solutions, as well as co-operation and net-
working. Most of what was said can be
ascribed to the need for a forum for deci-
sion makers and tourism actors to discuss
holistic and long-term planning of tourism
in the town. According to the interviewees
the present development is based on the
needs of individual entrepreneurs rather
than joint aspirations.
58
Seite 58
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