Measuring and evaluating the influence of cultural sustainability indicators on sustainable cultural tourism development: Scale development and validation

In the past few decades, tourism has significantly impacted the ecological, social, and environmental dimensions, making sustainability facilitation more vital. These aspects are also regarded as the primary pillars of sustainable tourism development. Culture is the cornerstone for accomplishing sustainable tourism research and practice goals in many domains. Culture has received very little attention despite being the deeply rooted and reliable framework for human existence. As a part of cultural tourism, even Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) has been largely ignored in sustainable tourism development. Moreover, the varied sustainability dimensions do not explain cultural sustainability indicators and how these indicators influence sustainable cultural tourism development. Therefore, firstly, this research aims to develop and measure a new scale for Cultural Sustainability Indicators and Sustainable Cultural Tourism Development (SCTD) and, secondly, to examine the influence of Cultural Sustainability Indicators on SCTD growth. In this sense, data was gathered from tourism stakeholders using self-administered questionnaires. A total of 1000 respondents completed the questionnaire; 949 of those responses were deemed legitimate. The new scale development identified the seven most important cultural sustainability indicators- Authenticity, Awareness, Commodification and Transformation, Empowerment, Parallel Development, Promotion, and Sustainability Practices, and one indicator of SCTD growth-SCTD, through Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) in SPSS 20. Further, to investigate the influence of cultural sustainability indicators on the growth of SCTD, additional analysis is conducted using PLS-SEM in Smart PLS 4. The study results showed that, except for parallel development and promotion, the five cultural sustainability indicators significantly and positively influence SCTD. Thus, the study concludes that culture is one of the most important aspects of developing a sustainable tourism industry and may be used to assess the sustainability of tourist destinations. The primary contribution of this work is a scale that depicts current perspectives and solutions for the cultural tourism sector as perceived by different stakeholders.