Foreign tourist's perceptions on the world heritage of Macau

This is very simple and personal Master dissertation. It is based in a survey on foreign tourists’ perceptions on Macau heritage, mainly the UNESCO world heritage ‘historic center’ list, grounded on my long term experience as a tourist guide of non-Chinese visitors. In fact, it was precisely my experience and interaction with those foreign tourists along several years, mainly westerners, which suggested the interest and relevance of this dissertation. Most of these tourists coming from Australia, Americas, and Europe are very short term visitors. Half of a day is normally enough for them to visit and enjoy the main heritage cultural sites of Macau.
This dissertation is built with a questionnaire aiming to construct a serial and quantitative perception of foreign tourists on different aspects of our cultural and historical heritage. First, the questionnaire addresses their personal perception; secondly, enquires their sites perception, and thirdly analyzes statically their cultural perception. Some complementary qualitative interviews are added to the quantitative survey, but the dissertation was not organized as a qualitative research using its very especial methodological tools. It is a quantitative study based in a very concrete survey targeting perceptions, cultural representations, and not any kind of ‘real’ or ‘objective’
understanding. The goal was to enquiry foreign tourists and to obtain a preliminary set of perception problems on Macau world heritage main sites.
200 questionnaires were distributed, and we validated 170 answers. It is an important collection of data, original and unique, allowing us to highlight some patterns on the cultural linkages between foreign tourists and the Macau world heritage most visited sites. From this collection of 170 questionnaires, a quantitative and statistic research was displayed grounding finally a large set of recommendations.