Industrial tourism is tourism in which the desired destination includes industrial sites peculiar to a particular location. The concept is not new, as it includes wine tours in France, visits to cheesemakers in the Netherlands, Jack Daniel's distillery tours in the United States for example, but has taken on renewed interest in recent times, with both industrial heritage sites and modern industry attracting tourism.
Attractiveness
Even if the concept is subjective, depending on a person's preferences, it has been noticed that people like to see and experience the present or historic production processes of:
goods with a symbolic character for a region ;
branded, luxury goods like cars, watches and jewels;
technologically demanding, innovative goods like computers and airplanes;
An attractions directory for some Central SE European countries illustrates and includes this classification. The attractiveness perception is also influenced by the cities' of destination ability to build touristic packages that reflect their industrial image and/or identity; respectively, in the case of tour operators, by mastering the industrial component in their attraction mix in the offered packages. Presently, even on the mature markets, there are relatively few tour operators providing industrial tourism packages, completing other offers and almost always missing the specialized ones, as researched in a market study conducted by one of the tour operators providing such specialized services.
Destinations
The most obvious industrial tourism destinations are cities and regions with a solid industrial base. For them, industrial tourism is a potential growth sector that matches with their identity: the sector offers opportunities to strengthen their distinctiveness and image, notably by building onto their already existing assets. However, successful achievements are few and mostly in the developed countries where a culture of leadership and collaboration between the different stakeholders at the community's governance level already exists. There is a positive trend and some remarkable achievements in Central Europe, China and India too. Also, attention is being paid worldwide to reconvert economically collapsed mono industrial areas. Important conditions for evaluating a destination's industrial tourism potential are:
the quality of the location ;
the accessibility of the attractions ;
the availability of information.
Particularities of the demand
the largest majority of industrial tourists are from mature outgoing markets ;
well travelled tourists, already saturated by the classic attractions or second time visitors, shift from pleasure travel to in depth experience and education;
increased curiosity about the manufacturing sector and industrial works from the younger generation for which, due to the new technologies and globalization, the domain is almost historic;
active, elderly or retired workers and professionals driven by nostalgia and professional curiosity;
Being a universal cultural asset, the industrial heritage and archeology gets a serious institutional, academic and governmental interest worldwide in the last decades, positively impacting its touristic potential too.
