Midnight in Paris: on heritage and nostalgia

Highlights

• Need to belong varies with the degree of social isolation resulting from COVID-19.

• Increased need to belong enhances preference for heritage tourism.

• Nostalgia mediates the effect of need to belong on preference for heritage tourism.

• Trait nostalgia proneness moderates the effect of need to belong on nostalgia state.

Abstract

Heritage tourism has attracted attention academically and in the industry. We study how preference for heritage tourism is motivated by individuals' need to belong, which varies as a result of differential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. In two studies, we measure this natural manipulation of need to belong and study its impact in a quasi-experimental manner. We find that need to belong affects preference for heritage tourism through its effect on nostalgic feeling. Individuals with higher need to belong have higher state nostalgia and prefer heritage tourism that may help satisfy their nostalgic yearning. In addition, we identify the moderating role of trait nostalgia proneness. Individuals who are more nostalgia-prone are more susceptible to this need-to-belong effect.

Introduction

When traveling was halted during the pandemic, art critic Jason Farago wrote about French movies that helped transport him to Paris when he wanted an escape (Farago, 2020). Among the 10 movies, six were made in the '70s or before. The oldest was Boudu Saved from Drowning, which has a history of 80 years. Other people tuned to the Opéra National de Paris' YouTube Channel for some ballet or opera at the Palais Garnier (Rosenbloom, 2020). The 2011 movie Midnight in Paris hinted at one reason why people long for their experience with Paris. Exploring the theme of nostalgia, the movie follows Gil Pender, a screenwriter who experiences traveling back in time to Paris, where he meets people such as Ernest Hemingway and Juan Belmonte. The rich heritage of Paris provides an excellent background for Gil to yearn for the past and seek escape from the relationship with his materialistic fiancée. Similarly, when facing different degrees of social isolation during the pandemic, many of us were feeling nostalgic for elements of the past, or for an escape to someplace interesting.

This recent surge in nostalgia is not limited to Paris—it encompasses other destinations. Leslie Jamison, an American novelist and essayist, recalled her first experience with Cemberlitas, one of the oldest hammam, commissioned in 1584 at Istanbul (Jamison, 2020). Luke Sharrett, a photographer, shared a collection of pictures along Route 66, which stretches more than 2400 miles from Chicago to Santa Monica. The images of “rusty windmills seemed to transport me back in times to the days when the Western United States was (in my imagination, at least) still wild and untamed” and “when gleaming porcelain signs directed American-made sedans toward shiny roadside motels” during the highway's heyday (Sharrett, 2020).

Indeed, people's obsession with the past also manifests in domains other than traveling, and as the pandemic dragged on. According to James Daunt, CEO of Barnes & Noble, sales of epic classics such as Tolstoy's War and Peace increased during the pandemic (Verlaine, 2020). Likewise, sales of vinyl records (Brown, 2020) and classic board games (Allwood, 2020) went up. Old-school roller-skating made a big comeback. “The retro pastime provided a pleasant distraction, a hit of whimsical nostalgia and a way to work off quarantine weight gain” (Jackson, 2020). When NBA play was interrupted, Sony Network replayed classic games from the '80s and '90s when Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant were in their prime (Arambur, 2020). People were looking for every way that could transport them back in time when the world was frozen by the coronavirus.

While the pandemic is definitely a catalyst of the nostalgic trend, the preference for nostalgia consumption has been on the rise for some years. For instance, nostalgic themed movies and television shows are increasingly popular (Sedikides, Wildschut, Routledge, Arndt, Hepper, & Zhou, 2015). Vinyl album sales in the US have grown for 15 consecutive years (Richter, 2021). Many products have made use of its brand heritage in its marketing (Merchant & Rose, 2013). The last Blockbuster outlet at Bend, Oregon has become a nostalgic themed tourist attraction (Conditt, 2020). Nostalgia is also ubiquitous across individual demographic backgrounds (Sedikides, Wildschut, Routledge, Arndt, Hepper, & Zhou, 2015) and cultures (Hepper et al., 2014). Some Asian destinations such as Singapore (Peleggi, 2005) and Macau (Leong, Yeh, & Chang, 2015; Leong, Yeh, Hsiao, & Huan, 2015) are popular for their rich heritage.

We study this phenomenon in the context of tourism. Heritage tourism specifically is a popular and relevant topic in both practice and academic research (Yeh, 2015), and related research on the role of nostalgia remains lacking (Christou et al., 2018; Jarratt & Gammon, 2016). In particular, we identify need to belong as an antecedent of the preference for heritage tourism. In the midst of the pandemic, people all over the world faced varying degrees of lockdown and social isolation measures. Some things have changed permanently. For example, Suresh Kumar, CTO of Walmart, said that “working virtually will be the new normal” (Streitfeld, 2020).

Lack of social support deprives people of the ability to fulfill their need to belong, which can be satisfied directly by engaging in social interaction with others. During the lockdown in Australia, people who were all by themselves were “finding that they need to interact with someone even if it's just someone walking around a green space with you” (Cave, 2020). There are also indirect ways to cope with social deprivation. When the 13th-century Salisbury Cathedral in southwestern England was turned into a vaccine hub, people waiting for a shot were soothed by the Gothic style of the building and the organ playing classical masterpieces by Bach, Mozart, and Handel (Marshall, 2021). There seems to be a natural connection between social deprivation and the nostalgic feeling evoked by things of the past.

In the current paper, we explore the impact of perceived social connectedness on preference for heritage tourism. Campbell et al. (2020) proposed that the social distancing rules imposed by different governments made many of us more isolated socially. This circumstance presents a chance to test the relationship between social deprivation and preference for heritage tourism in a quasi-experimental manner. Such an approach could be advantageous given that the feeling of social deprivation is a subjective one, differing across individuals' social skills (Goulding, 2001). The theoretical implications of our findings go beyond the pandemic, as social deprivation has become a general problem in the modern world as the result of migration, evolving family patterns, and growing life expectancies (Kasprzak, 2010). From this perspective, one practical significance of heritage tourism could be its functional therapeutic potential to alleviate social deprivation and improve wellbeing.