No abstract

Is the designation World Heritage Site (WHS) effective? Does it yield high net brand equity? The five research objectives in the present study seek to explore awareness of the designation/logo, the meanings attached to the designation, the effects of the designation on tourists’ intended future behaviors, the relationship between number of WHSs and a country’s image, and the relationship between perception of a site as part of the world heritage and tourist behaviors. The postpositivistic research began with an exploratory stage followed by structured questionnaires focusing on a Christian heritage site in Israel. The findings indicate only moderate awareness of the designation/logo barely affecting behaviors. However, the cumulative effect of WHS designations is positively related to willingness to revisit a particular country. In addition, the findings highlight the significance of the experientially based approach to the management of heritage sites.

This study examines whether branding archeological sites as World Heritage Sites (WHSs) will affect potential demand patterns. The study's research objectives are (1) to explore awareness of potential visitors to the brand and logo of WHS; (2) to investigate the effects of the designation on tourists' future behaviors; (3) to clarify whether the number of sites designated (3 versus 10) has an effect on future visitation patterns; and (4) to reveal possible relationships between the perception of a site as part of the world heritage and UNESCO's designation. This study commenced with an exploratory stage followed by administration of structured questionnaires focusing on inbound tourists to Caesarea, an archeological historical site in Israel. The findings indicate only moderate visitor awareness of the WHS title and logo, implying low brand equity as well as insignificant effects on future demand patterns. Moreover, visitors' willingness to pay (WTP) as well as overall motivation to visit seems to decline following the designation. However, visitors' perception of the site as world heritage is positively linked to WTP. The number of designated sites within a particular state is found to have a positive effect on future demand patterns. Based on the findings specific recommendations are offered.

Numerous papers have reported great success at inferring the political orientation of Twitter users. This paper has some unfortunate news to deliver: while past work has been sound and often methodologically novel, we have discovered that reported accuracies have been systemically overoptimistic due to the way in which validation datasets have been collected, reporting accuracy levels nearly 30% higher than can be expected in populations of general Twitter users. Using careful and novel data collection and annotation techniques, we collected three different sets of Twitter users, each characterizing a different degree of political engagement on Twitter - from politicians (highly politically vocal) to "normal" users (those who rarely discuss politics). Applying standard techniques for inferring political orientation, we show that methods which previously reported greater than 90% inference accuracy, actually achieve barely 65% accuracy on normal users. We also show that classifiers cannot be used to classify users outside the narrow range of political orientation on which they were trained. While a sobering finding, our results quantify and call attention to overlooked problems in the latent attribute inference literature that, no doubt, extend beyond political orientation inference: the way in which datasets are assembled and the transferability of classifiers.