Tourism Marketing of the Hakka Genealogical Digital Archive

Abstract

Family history can be a very interesting research field which has not yet been much explored. The genealogy is one kind of digital archives. There are many researches focusing on the digitization of family history and genealogical material. There are three types of genealogy tourism in Hakka ethnic group, including homeland tourism, family temple names tourism, and common ancestor tourism. According to the genealogy curious and return intention to homeland, there are four kinds of ancestral tourists. The recognition of the role of technology and the increasing use of the internet for genealogy development has offered new opportunities to sell accommodation and other tourism-related products. The genealogy tourism marketing matrix has four alternatives of marketing strategies:well-developed genealogy tourism, enhance ancestral connection, improve tourism infrastructure, and potential genealogy tourism. Responding to this, this study proposed four key factors which are identified to have facilitated the development of genealogy tourism, including information communication technology, resources, search for identity, and postmodern forms of tourism. There are several challenging issues in linking genealogy and tourism including interpretation, marketing built genealogy, planning for genealogy, and the interdependencies between genealogy tourism and the Hakka cultural industry.