Telling Stories About a Rich Heritage Destination. Narratives and Navigations

The online presentation of a destination, attraction or related tourism player demands that their managers choose and enact adequate narratives. This happens in a twofold way: on the one hand, explicitly, by recourse to texts, images, videos and the like; on the other, tourism players may more implicitly flesh out their stories through outbound links to external resources, establishing an informal network of reference, i.e. the set of associations between institutions that outbound links may implicitly suggest for users. The case of Monte San Giorgio as a tourism destination is presented, exploring most of the relevant online narratives and the links provided by concerned players and institutions. Such a case is of particular interest because it blends a very clear identity as a natural UNESCO World Heritage Site with a significant presence of further narratives—including archeology, botany, religious traditions and eno-gastronomy—, with implications for practitioners of destination systems with a complex identity. This study highlights the predominant role of the paleontological narrative, linked to the UNESCO listing, at times combined with further perspectives. When further relevant narratives are present, they are frequently narrated with no connection with the previous one. Furthermore, external links do not lead to a clear and dense network structure: most websites lack outbound links, while the few with links seldom tend to point to a select number of websites. A potential theoretical suggestion is that network-ness as implied by outbound linking activity is a decreasingly salient feature of institutional website communication in heritage destinations, while practitioners may glint that the role of outbound linking is of reduced or oblique relevance to the construction of online narrations in heritage destination systems.