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No. 8 (2026)
Marketing

Scientific articles

ANALYSIS OF TOURISTS’ATTITUDES TOWARD CULTURAL EXPERIENCES: ENDORSEMENT CONCENTRATION THRESHOLDS, ENGAGEMENT AND VALENCE CONVERSION, AND INTERPRETIVE MEDIATION IN THE PERCEPTION OF NATIONAL HERITAGE

DOI 10.67668/mj/2026iss8/2092 Pages 442-457

Published 2026-08-30

Authors
Gofurjonova Musharrafkhon Shekhratjon kizi
Affiliation
Tashkent State University of Economics image/svg+xml
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Abstract

Heritage policy is built on the premise that the significance of a monument governs how visitors respond to it. This article tests that premise on a panel of twenty heritage sites in Uzbekistan and a thirteen-country benchmark, using three constructs: the concentration of articulated endorsement relative to the visits that produce it, the decomposition of visitor response into engagement conversion and valence conversion, and interpretive mediation, a construct introduced here to score the degree to which a site supplies a structured narrative rather than bare fabric. The premise does not survive. Heritage significance grade accounts for 2.0 per cent of the variation in the share of five-star reviews across sites, with a coefficient of 0.092 and a t statistic of 0.61, and it remains statistically indistinguishable from zero in every specification of the nested ladder. Interpretive provision accounts for 75.9 per cent, and one step on its three-point scale multiplies the odds of a five-star review by 1.69. The comparison is close to matched: sites with full narrative interpretation and sites left as bare fabric carry an identical mean significance grade of 4.00 and differ by 29.0 percentage points in endorsement, with a Welch statistic of 7.41. The group holding the most significant sites in the panel ranks second, not first. Uzbekistan sits at the benchmark median on how tourists rate its heritage and ninth of thirteen on how much they say about it, at 47 per cent of the median review volume per inscribed property. The article reads this as evidence that significance is a credence attribute that cannot enter evaluation until interpretation converts it into an experience attribute, and it sets out what follows for site management.

Keywords

heritage tourism, visitor attitudes, interpretation, credence attributes, online reviews, conversion efficiency, Uzbekistan

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