New Business Drivers of Hong Kong Cultural Museums: The Tourism Stakeholder Perspective

Museums have come to be expected to perform a broader range of economic and tourism functions. This qualitative study aims to investigate cultural museums' potential to be tourism products and how to make them successful from a supply side perspective. Twenty semi-structured interviews with tourism stakeholders in Hong Kong were analysed. The study illustrates the challenges and constraints facing tourism stakeholders in developing Hong Kong museums as tourism products in order to solve their deficit problem. Therefore, both revenue generation and cost-cutting strategies are identified. The tourism potential of Hong Kong museums is relatively low, because of the low novelty of Hong Kong museums' exhibition, stereotypes of Hong Kong and low visitation from both tourists and local residents. The study also finds that a dichotomy between museums and tourism has been governed by museum policy in Hong Kong. This unequal relationship thus becomes the biggest challenge to tourism stakeholders in Hong Kong.