Kystturisme, fyrtårne og romantisk oplevelsesdesign

It's Lovely Here!

Abstract

This article takes its point of departure in a qualitative survey asking for the best experience at the Norwegian coastal lighthouse attraction — Lindesnes Lighthouse. The survey was part of a culture-based innovation project which demonstrated that older, national and international couples with an interest in culture and history were an important consumer group. Still, its needs and life-world meanings were undetectable in the actual experience designs at the lighthouse.

In order to customise to this particular segment, the relationship between the couples, their coastal experiences and their cultural preconception of lighthouse landscape as sublime, transforming and emotional, has been discussed. Furthermore the concept of "commercial storytelling" has been examined for its possibility to inform leisure strategies; relationship staging and self-realisation, meaningful to these late modern, middle-class couples.

At least, since the beginning of the 18th century, in travel literature and in honeymoon letters, maritime landscape — such as Niagara Falls, lighthouses, sea views and mountain sides — has been romanticised as sublime and spectacular. Wind, oceans and waterfalls have been given a transforming quality which, magically and through experiencing, affects people's inner emotions and social relationships. A cultural institution like Lindesnes Lighthouse can design its leisure consumption through this cultural narrative of strong, romantic emotions which historically belongs to this type of geography. In this sense, a tourist attraction can add to a couple's romantic self-narration by a strategic experience design which is themed through cultural ideas of sublime natural surroundings. The intentionality of the design is to create social meaning by consolidating and materialising the romantic tourist's cultural ideal of a true, real and transforming relationship.