Faced with a crisis that seems more structural than cyclical, local authorities have a major asset for creating jobs: their cultural heritage! But they must turn their sites into profit centers. Rational and innovative tourism development can increase visitor numbers.

The two-year Master in Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Tourism (5-year postsecondary) was born from a strong conviction of IESA arts&culture, championed in particular by Alain Monferrand, member of the Advisory Board and professor, former secretary general of the Conseil national du tourisme and director of the Observatoire national du tourisme: heritage is a French asset that cannot be relocated and that creates jobs.

I want to learn about the Master in Heritage

If local authorities do nothing, in the context of a lasting structural crisis, many monuments will have to close their doors for lack of the means to maintain them and ensure sufficient staffing to welcome the public.

Yet these audiences exist, with France remaining the country that receives the most foreign visitors. But it is only the 3rd global destination in terms of tourism revenue, behind the United States and Spain.

Worse, according to the World Economic Forum’s annual report on competitiveness in the travel and tourism sectors, it dropped in one year from 3rd to 7th place, far behind Switzerland, Germany and Austria.

A 5-Year-Level Program in Cultural Heritage and Tourism That Meets a Need in the Sector

The credo of the Cultural Tourism and Heritage Enhancement program offered by IESA arts&culture is simple: to train professionals who will turn heritage into tourism effectively, thanks to a concrete approach to the issues linked to this development.

It will thus give them the opportunity to talk with all the professionals working on the tourism development of a site or territory and to make the projects they will carry out possible by knowing how to get them to work together.

All of this will give students the skills to propose, for each site, a suitable tourism development:

  • good general knowledge,
  • systematic study of funding applications,
  • comparative case analysis (failures and successes),
  • taking part in the VMF-IESA Prize,
  • on-site visits to analyze the field…

The program will include meetings with:

Cultural tourism: a sector that creates jobs

Pricing policy, cultural wealth, innovation in site programming and mediation, infrastructure and transport network development policy, human resources… the criteria and levers for reversing this trend are many. Today cultural tourism is a sector that represents more than 7% of GDP and 2 million direct and indirect jobs. But it is an underexploited sector! With a better tourism development policy, some experts suggest it could create nearly a million additional jobs. French heritage must therefore be developed for tourism in order to attract and retain audiences beyond the major flagship monuments.