Literary hotels: A new type of literary tourism or just a product?

Abstract

The study aims to evaluate the status of literary hotels in literary tourism and to discuss whether literary hotels are just a literary tourism product or should be a separate type of literary tourism. The study seeks to answer the following questions: 1) What are the literary connections of literary hotels? 2) What kind of experience do literary hotels promise according to the themes chosen? Document analysis, which is one of the qualitative research methods, was used in the research to gather data. The data used in this study include 57 hotel websites which provided information in English regarding the hotel’s literary connection on their website. Five different types of literary hotels have been found as literary-themed hotels, hotels associated with an author, hotels dedicated to an author, hotels associated with a fictional work or a character, and library hotels. The findings of the study show that literary hotels are not a single type of tourism product, but a wide-ranging type that offers a variety of products and experiences to multiple target audiences under different categories.

Keywords

• literary tourism
• literary tourism types
• literary tourism products
• literary hotels