Tourism Destinations “Where You Can Engage in Battles with the Romans”: The Role of Reenactment in Shaping a Destination Image

Tourists prefer destinations well known for reenactment representation for various reasons. Our preliminary qualitative–quantitative study on how reenactors perceive their role in the public agora and the visitors’ experience at destination revealed that reenactors actually play an active role in modeling the experience tourists have at the destination and in some cases, over decades, the tourism destination in itself. The results revealed both a direct and an indirect role of reenactors in developing a heritage site as a tourism destination. The direct impact is resulting from the participation in the decision-making boards of local administrative structures, museum’s managerial teams, attracting funding and developing tourism strategies for the site. It also resides in founding reenactment groups that becomes inspirational and reenactment festivals that attract exponentially more visitors to the site. Their indirect role comes from the design of the reenactment activities, the tourist animation, the level of involvement of tourists during the activities and the emotions tourists have at the destination. The study also revealed the reenactors’ perspective of the importance of the context in which they act. Different countries and regions have different policies regarding the approval of festivals near a site and funding the reenactment. Differences could be explained by the differences in the life cycle stages of the tourism destinations or their long-term strategy. The practical implications of the study reside in helping the local authorities to design new levers of developing a heritage tourism destination and to understand the long-term implications of making from reenactment performances funding a priority.