Tourism and Museums: awareness of heritage enhancement

Abstract

The main goal of this study is to understand the degree of knowledge of existing museums in a city in Central Portugal by students of the professional higher technical course in tourism (level V course). This work was based on collecting information about the habits of visiting museums among students of a level V course, a questionnaire was prepared for this purpose and the methodology of quantitative analysis was applied. The results refer to three main reflections: 1) a significant number of students have never visited any of the existing museums in the city, despite being their academic residence city; 2) If you visited a museum in the city, you learned about its existence because you passed by the museum or because friends recommended you to visit; 3) the main reasons for visiting museums are the desire to get to know them, walk around and study visits. The main limitation of this study is the comparative analysis between other courses at the same level of education. The result of this study leads to priority actions for further investigation into the existing links between the dynamics of tourism and visiting museums in the variables, profile, motivation, and attractiveness, and it is particularly interesting to understand these dimensions of the behavior of students in general who travel to museums and how they take advantage of the visitation experience. To our knowledge, this study is fundamental: 1) for contributing to the current state of student interest in museums, leaving as a priority conclusion the need to include the promotion and “mandatory” visitation of existing museums around the educational institution. 2) for contributing to the promotion of the territory's heritage resources, being a fundamental opportunity to diversify the practical component of learning in this thematic area.