Visitors’ Perception Based Authenticity in Tourism Development Project

Within the in-depth development of culture-historical block tourism and the involvement of new capital, a new type of culture-historical block tourism has flourished in time. Unlike the traditional culture-historical blocks, these emerging culture-historical blocks are usually archaized blocks. There have been some debates about the relationship between these kinds of archaized blocks and tourism authenticity. It is evident that due to the characteristics of this kind of archaized culture-historical blocks, they lack authenticity. However, whether the authenticity could be perceived by the local residents or tourists still needs to be argued. In this paper, it examined visitors’ perception of authenticity at Xietang Old Street, an archaized project in Suzhou, China. The construction of many historical heritage sites raised the issue about authenticity in tourism. However, visitors’ perceptions towards authenticity in this site continues to be mostly unknown. The study applied questionnaires and interviews to collect data from February 2019 to March 2019 at Xietang Old Street. Visitors were asked to rate the authenticity of many aspects of Xietang Old Street on a Likert-scale and to