علی حسنی

Tour guides are considered as one of the key players within the tourism supply chain, serving as direct interfaces with visitors and acting as cultural mediators between diverse cultures. They exert a significant influence on tourists' intentions for repeat visits. Nowadays, tourists are not merely seeking basic information from guides, as they can easily access such information online. Instead, they are in search of creative, authentic, interactive experiences with participatory learning, demanding the presence of creativity in tour guides. Consequently, guides need to demonstrate new forms of creativity in their performance. Creativity is a pivotal aspect for achieving professional success in the realm of tour guiding. The depth of their professional knowledge and their creative abilities significantly impact the quality of tours and the portrayal of destinations. As cultural intelligence is one of the critical dimensions of creativity, this research aims to explore the relationship between cultural intelligence and the creativity of tour guides. Using a library review method, it examines the role of cultural intelligence, its dimensions, and indicators. Ultimately, it presents a conceptual framework for fostering the creativity of tour guides, grounded in the principles of cultural intelligence.

By producing the paradigm of creative tourism, the knowledge increasing discipline of tourism invites tourists to visit and interact with the unique and live culture of societies instead of just sightseeing in museums and ancient monuments. In this paradigm, tourists engage all of their senses in the creation of their unique experience and improving their relations with local people from seller/buyer to a master/apprentice level. Not only the cultural capital but also the social capital would be increased from this interaction. The main goal of this research is to show that, contrary to what appears at first, the creative domain of gastronomy is a spiritual one and flourishing local communities and creative tourism based on this paradigm can evolve the wellbeing and material life of inhabitants and tourists as well. Moreover, this includes significant spiritual endowments both for guests and hosts in the creative gastronomic destinations. Creative tourism based on gastronomy regards new looks to local communities as the first step in creating unique and added value experiences including economic, human, and social values. In creative tourism, locals and tourists will open their eyes on the destination in completely new ways, so that they could see better in creating new and valuable experiences. This definition is closely related to the Quranic command of “The man must consider what he eats”. In this research, using thematic analysis and Delphi method, it is shown that the components of spiritual perception have significant overlaps with the components of gastronomic creative tourism. Factors such as “comfort and satisfaction”, “Giving meaning to life”, “interaction with others”, “friendship with nature and environment”, and “surrender and thanksgiving “, as the components of the spiritual understanding, showed common and undeniable spaces with the components of creative tourism. These components include “authentic experiences “, “active participation “, “learning”, “self-esteem and self-awareness”, “new products and processes”, and “new spaces”. Based on our results, each of these components has their own proprietary domains and non-negligible common spaces, and even in some cases are subsets of each other.

Spirituality is a universal and human phenomenon which is not restricted to any religions or religious groups. In fact, spiritual experiences are thought of as special human experiences which give meaning to life. Such enlightening experiences make man connect to a higher being. Therefore, spiritual tourism is a journey on which a traveller achieves a perception of spiritual experiences. Such experiences can be gained on a long walk with a group of sympathetic fellow travelers towards religious destinations. They may also be achieved while watching a pristine view of the nature which enables the viewer to understand the creator of the scene and reach deep meanings through a creative insight. Creative tourism is mostly manifested as a form of inner expression and discovery, a tool of improvement in identity and distinction or a search for the expansion of capabilities and experiences as well as an ability to reflect the life purposefully. This type of tourism belongs to self-actualizing individuals. In fact, they are educated people who seek to give meaning to life. Therefore, the creative tourism theory is the closest approach to tourism combined with spirituality. These two categories overlap with each other significantly. In this qualitative study, the two-stage Delphi technique and desk research method were used to verify this hypothesis. Creative tourism can be thought of as a new paradigm of tourism or the third generation after coastal tourism and cultural tourism. It can also be considered an evolved type of cultural tourism which pays more attention to the intangible heritage rather than the tangible one. In either case, it is a form of network tourism in which values are created collectively through available relationships and the flow of social relationships and capital in networks. Therefore, its new management models and strategies should be identified and applied. In the current study, the desk research method was used to identify such models. Then the two-stage Delphi technique was employed to verify them.