For verifying differences and changes of tourists’ perceptions between 2014 and 2018, tourists were asked to answer eleven questions through the questionnaire. The questionnaire first asked about respondents’ awareness of HV as a WHS. Of the 348 respondents in 2014, 87.6% answered that they knew that HV was inscribed on the WHL. In 2018, of the 172 tourists sampled, 94.2% answered that they recognized HV as a WHS. The results of the question regarding tourists’ awareness of HV’s WHL inscription are shown in
Table 4.
The results of the other questions regarding tourists’ perceptions toward HV and WHS are shown in
Table 5. Of all the tourists’ perceptions verified in this study, two noteworthy issues regarding the WHL inscription’s tourism impact continuity, such as (1) WH as a tourists’ brand and (2) future management of HV as a WHS for maintaining brand equity, are discussed.
4.1. WH as a Tourists’ Brand
In both the 2014 and 2018 surveys, most respondents said that the WHL inscription of HV is one of their important motivations to visit. Of the questionnaire respondents in 2014, 63.4% reported that the WHL inscription stimulated their desire to visit HV. Similarly, 69.8% of respondents in the 2018 survey agreed that the WHL inscription stimulated their desire to visit HV, while 30.2% disagreed with this statement. Additionally, 61% of respondents in 2014 and 64% of respondents in 2018 believed that the WHL inscription makes HV a “must see” location, while 39% in 2014 and 36% in 2018 disagreed. One notable point of this result comparison is that the percentages in both 2014 and 2018 are similar, regardless of the passage of time.
These perceptions would make it seem that WH itself is recognized as a powerful brand to tourists in both surveys, and the brand impact of WH slightly increased further (6.4%) in 2018 from 2014. According to the American Marketing Association, a brand is defined as a “name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competition [
21]”. In other words, a major function of a brand is offering a promise of value and differentiation [
22] to outrival other similar items: In this sense, WH seemed to be recognized as a splendid tourism brand, according to the survey results. In addition, the brand equity of WH lasts regardless of the passage of time, which could play a significant role in tourists’ motivation. More than half of the respondents in both 2014 (56.7%) and 2018 (54.7%) noted that the WHL inscription makes it more attractive than other non-WHS historic villages. Furthermore, the majority of the respondents in 2014 (85.1%) and in 2018 (80.2%) thought that the WHL inscription makes HV a tourist “hot spot” in the country, while only 14.9% in 2014 and 19.8% in 2018 disagreed. Thus, most respondents perceived that WHL inscription makes HV a more attractive tourism destination than not only other historic villages but also other heritage sites.
Even though, the WH system was not intended to create a tourism brand, the title and symbol of WH seems to be a guarantee by UNESCO, which is the best historical organization in the world, especially with regard to cultural aspects, and WHS has more valuable outstanding universal value to see than other non-WHS heritage sites. According to Ryan and Silvanto [
22], in the situation where most tourists lack the knowledge to judge the rank of cultural uniqueness and importance of heritage sites, the title WH is a kind of “seal of approval” to pass expert scrutiny and recognize its exemplary important value.
The perception of WH as a powerful tourism brand tends to be widely believed as much as WH’s increasing tourism. Therefore, for tourism marketing in many WHS, the title WH is used as a “tourism marketing device [
19] (p. 70)”. In the case of HV, the symbols of UNESCO and WH are clearly visible, used like a tourism brand, in the center of the front page of the official HV website (
Figure 1). Through the results of the questionnaire, the case of WH symbols usage, and previous studies, it can be seen that WH is recognized and applied as an influential tourism brand in most countries.
As mentioned above, one notable point is that, in the case of HV, increasing tourism after WHL inscription was mostly dedicated by local tourists. In a situation where the number of domestic tourists is limited, it is reasonable to plan for an increasing revisitation rate in the interest of long-term tourism development. At the same time, it is important that HV be recognized as a WHS by foreign tourists, who still make up a small amount of the market share of HV tourism today, through more effective marketing methods. The brand impact of the WH has the potential to draw not only domestic tourists, but to also have a strong influence on tourists internationally.
4.2. Future Management of HV as a WHS for Maintaining Brand Equity
As stated above, in 2010, HV faced a rapid increase in visitors after the WHL inscription. However, after rapidly increasing in 2010, between 2011 and 2012, the number of tourists visiting tapered off, as shown in
Table 1.
Since 2008 when the village prepared for the WHL inscription in earnest, it prepared heritage preservation and tourism development plans to improve the village environment for expected increasing tourism after the WHL inscription. The plans, especially focused on improvement of physical environments, including enlargement of the parking lot outside the village, tourism complex development, the opening of exhibition facilities like Hahoe Mask Museum, and traffic line modification, were put into operation between 2008 and 2012 [
40]. In 2013, when the plans and the tourism environment were improved, the number of visitors rose again, and the village has sustained slightly over one million since 2014. Therefore, the increasing tourism after 2012 could not be all due to the WH brand impact.
The recognition of WH as an influential tourism brand means that the title WH also leads to expectations of high standards from the perspectives of both heritage value and service convenience for tourists. Therefore, for maintaining the brand equity of WH, it is necessary to satisfy tourists’ expectations of high standards as a WHS. In other words, maintaining continued recognition of WHS through satisfying tourists can exercise continuous impact as a powerful tourism brand. Not only WH, but all brands need to provide higher value as a brand that consumers expect to maintain continuous brand impact. According to M’zungu and Merrilees [
41], consistent delivery of the brand is mandatory for building and sustaining brand equity. Consequently, the level differences of delivery experience through the various components that motivate tourism activities, including accessibility, price, program diversity and originality—even though these elements are not actually related to the WHL inscription—are influential both directly and indirectly on WH’s brand equity; thus, increasing tourism continuity based on the brand value of WH could also be influenced, not only by the WHS itself, but also various surrounding tangible and intangible elements of the site.
Like HV, heritage sites inscribed by the WHL commonly establish and utilize tourism development plans to accept demands for increasing tourism. These plans aim to increase tourists’ re-visitation and create new tourism activities through enhancing tourist satisfaction. In the case of HV, after finishing tourism development from 2008 to 2012, other tourism development plans, involving both hardware improvement (such as constructing a new visitor center, extending a parking lot, and reorganizing visitor traffic with a shuttle bus and ticketing system), and also software improvement, including increasing visitors’ possibilities of traditional experiences like Seonyujwibulnori (the traditional fireworks) and Hahoebyulsinguttalnori (the traditional mask dance), were consistently established and utilized for delivering a better tourism experience and satisfaction to visitors.
According to the result of the 2014 and 2018 surveys, a large number of respondents (69.6% in 2014 and 66.3% in 2018) noted that they were satisfied with the trip to HV in general, while 30.4% in 2014 and 33.7% in 2018 were unsatisfied. However, in 2014, the answers to a question about their satisfaction of the cultural experiences in HV were totally different to the answers of general satisfaction, in that only 27.6% reported that they were satisfied with the cultural experiences in HV. By 2018, 58.1% of respondents were satisfied with the cultural experiences in the village, so there was a vast improvement in offering the cultural experience in HV from 2014 to 2018. This was because plans established and utilized before 2014 were mostly focused on physical improvements of tourism environments, while tourists perceived a shortage of cultural and traditional experiences. Fortunately, the shortage of these experiences has been improved since 2014, and the result of this improvement is connected to increasing satisfaction with the cultural experiences in the 2018 survey. Thus, according to the comparison of survey results, the direction of tourism development plans for HV today is suitable to both increasing visitors’ satisfaction and promoting sustainable tourism. One interesting point appearing in both the 2014 and 2018 surveys is that tourists perceived needs for more heritage preservation and, at the same time, for more tourism development constructing better tourism infrastructure. Thus, planners could face difficulties in balancing dilemmas of heritage preservation and tourism development, which sometimes appear to be compatible.