Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) can be a valuable tourism resource for both government and local communities. However, the complex definition and the massive and fragmented nature of ICH data make it hard to review and conclude research trends and future directions of ICH tourism. In this study, 85 keywords extracted from ICH definitions are input in the Web of Science database before collecting papers indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index, the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, and the Conference Proceedings Citation Index-Social Science and Humanities. Later, a systematic literature review of 418 ICH tourism studies from 76 countries published between 2000 and 2021 were conducted based on three groups of questions. The findings mainly illustrated that: (1) Currently research in ICH tourism is mainly composed of three themes: resource planning and sustainability, the impact of tourism development, and tourist behavior and destination marketing; (2) topics related to food tourism, sacred knowledge, traditional management systems, traditional management systems, legends, and myths can achieve high impact; (3) in the last five years, scholars have reduced using the official full name of ICH in tourism studies, while the category of “social practices, rituals and festive events” has become a hot topic since 2010; (4) ecotourism, culinary tourism, festival tourism, and religious tourism are the most discussed in ICH tourism research, and they will still be intensive topics in near future; (5) future directions in ICH tourism research are resultant of three vectors: place making, technology, and environment. The results present a comprehensive picture of current popular ICH topics and predict future directions in the field of ICH tourism. The systematic review of literature can help contribute to both theoretical construction, heritage preservation, and tourism practices.

Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) has recently become an important area of tourism development for many countries that are home to such cultural resources. Within this context, the value of an ICH site has often been used to guide tourism development and policy making. In addition, community residents’ attitude and perception of ICH contribute to tourism development. In this study, we used the traditional firing technology of Longquan celadon in Zhejiang Province, China, as a case study to understand the relationships between value recognition and attitude along with the intention to visit the heritage site. We surveyed 368 residents and conducted path analysis to test such relationships. Findings revealed significant positive correlations between residents’ cognition of ICH value, their attitudes and travel intentions. Among them, attitudes played a mediating role in the formation of value cognition to travel intention. These findings offer insights into ICH-related tourism development, particularly regarding tourism product design, marketing and post-development evaluation, as well as the conservation of ICH sites.

The industry of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) tourism continues to grow, and social media can serve as an essential tool to promote this trend. Although ICH tourism development is outstanding in China, the language structure and restricted use of social media render ICH difficult for non-Chinese speakers to understand. Using content analysis, this study investigates the structure and relationships among cognitive elements of ICH tourism based on 9074 blogs posted between 2011 and 2020 on Weibo.com, one of the most popular social media platforms in China. The main analysis process consisted of matrix construction, dimension classification, and semantic network analysis. Findings indicated that the cognitive image of ICH tourism on social media can be divided into seven dimensions: institutions, ICH and inheritors, tourism products, traditional festivals and seasons, tourism facilities and services, visitors, and regions. This network vividly illustrates ICH tourism and depicts the roles of organizers, residents, inheritors, and tourists. Among these elements, institutions hold the greatest power to regulate and control ICH tourism activities, and folklore appears to be the most common type of ICH resource that can be developed into tourism activities. Practically, the results offer insight for policymakers regarding ways to better balance the relationships among heritage protection, the business economy, and people’s well-being. Such strategies can promote the industrialization of ICH tourism. In addition, through content analysis, this paper confirms the effectiveness of social media in providing a richer understanding of ICH tourism.

As a reflection of shifting and fluid experiences in time and space, live streaming can reduce losses in the tourism industry associated with travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Compared with the use of live streaming activities in entertainment, shopping, sport, e-sport, religious, educational, and academic settings, the tourism context has yet to be explored. This study takes China as a case to examine tourism practices related to live streaming. Specifically, 48,114 social media posts were subjected to systematic content analysis. The dataset contained live streaming content related to 147 countries and 34 Chinese provincial administrative regions between 2010 and 2021. Findings revealed the following: (1) the development of tourism live streaming in China can be classified into germination, exploration, and opportunity stages; (2) live content mainly evoked positive emotions, whereas negative sentiment resulted from illegal or boring content; (3) users’ perceptions of tourism live streaming content involved institutions, live streaming tools, live streaming attractions, the live streaming economy, people, facilities and information, time, and regions; and (4) live streaming tools and attractions constituted the core of the identified semantic network and had the strongest regulation capabilities in tourism live streaming activities. Findings shed light on latent cultural meanings in social media communications, where tourism live streaming features high-frequency linguistic signs.