Although theming has become an important differentiation strategy in the hotel industry and, accompanying the growth of cultural and literary tourism in recent decades, literature has been adopted as a central theme by numerous hotels worldwide, little to no research has been conducted on literary hotels. The inauguration of the Lisboa Pessoa, in Lisbon, in September 2016, dedicated to one of Portugal's most celebrated poets, offered an ideal opportunity to study the impact of literary theming in a new unit. A qualitative study, considering external online communications and guests' commentaries in social networking sites, was carried out to determine the thematic strategies implemented and the impact of these strategies on the perceived image of the hotel, in order to assess the influence of the theme on the experience of guests and the extent to which the Pessoa can be considered, from the guests' perspective, a literary hotel. Results showed that the impact of the literary theme on guests' perception was low, especially considering the clear theming efforts evinced in external communications, indicating that meanings must be more adequately conveyed if motifs are to truly inspire differentiated experiences.

The worldwide expansion of cultural and heritage tourism presents several opportunities for destination development, but also poses significant challenges in terms of management. This is especially true when different, overlapping, and potentially conflicting meanings coexist in the same location, as when distinct layers of the history of a site are unearthed by archaeology. Considering faith as confidence in the perpetuation of identities, an element common to both heritage and religion, this paper presents the results of a study of the heritagization process of a Christian chapel in Loulé (Algarve, Portugal), where traces of the city’s Islamic past were uncovered, and of the strategies implemented considering the site’s overlapping meanings. The results indicate that the embracement, rather than the suppression, of dissonant layers of significance in the heritagization of a religious site can contribute to a community’s richer sense of its enduring memory through a new dialogue with its multifaceted past and the validation of previously disregarded traces of its identity.

Recent studies about the relation between heritage and tourism have consistently signaled the existence of fractures between the cultural reality of tourism destinations and the cognitive and emotional experience of contemporary visitors. On the other hand, the study of the relations between tourism and literature and the recent valorization of storytelling in tourism promotion have both pointed out the importance of different types of discourses in the constitution of tourism spaces and the shaping of visitors’ expectations and experiences. When the desire for authenticity expressed by cultural tourists is also taken into account, the existence of inconsistencies between the cultural realities of destinations, existing discourses and the expectations and perceptions of tourists becomes apparent. Adapting, in an innovative approach, the Gap Model of Service Quality, this paper intends to present a research framework capable of enlightening existing cultural inconsistencies considering the discourses involved in the promotion and experience of tourism destinations. The framework will be applied in an exploratory investigation of the role of José Saramago’s Baltasar and Blimunda in the tourism promotion of Mafra and Lisbon, Portugal, with the aim of developing a conceptual model capable of describing inconsistencies in the promotion and experience of cultural destinations and facilitating the development of adequate mediation proposals.

The growth of literary tourism in the past decades presents several challenges, especially given the existence of inevitable gaps between the expectations of visitors and the cultural reality of destinations. Tour guides play a decisive role in mediating those differences, helping reconcile the appeal of literature with the material and immaterial heritage of the spaces visited. The promotion and experience of Mafra's National Palace (Portugal) based on the novel Baltasar and Blimunda, by Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, constitutes a paradigmatic case, given the novel's clearly ideological stance. To ascertain the mediation strategies used by tour guides, a qualitative study was designed including participant observation of guided tours and interviews with the professionals involved. Although a challenge for tour guides, the use of the contrasting stance provided by the novel proved highly productive, allowing guides a greater discursive freedom and visitors a more differentiated and engaging experience of the site.