The Art of Tourism: Crafting a Creative Tourism Management Framework for the Trays Festival Museum 4.0

The evolution of the experience economy has prompted museums to reassess their goals regarding emerging tourism trends and adjust to meet the rising demand for authentic tourist experiences, resulting in a paradigm shift towards co-creation, actively involving tourists with both tangible and intangible heritage. In Tomar, Portugal, the Trays Festival (TF) occurs every four years, attracting over six hundred thousand people. Rooted in national devotion to the Holy Spirit, TF features symbolic elements like trays, paper flowers, and wheat spikes, fostering local creativity and sustainable tourism development. Building on the prior research of Carvalho and Simões (2023), this paper aims to present a creative tourism management framework for the envisioned Trays Festival Museum (TFM). The methodology employed for this study includes a literature review of key variables of the study and content analysis was used to examine the creative potential of the festival confronting the proposed technological thematic concept of the TFM (Carvalho and Simões (2023). The framework underscores the importance of technology, creativity, and authentic tourism encounters, aligning with cultural tourism 4.0 traits towards a conceptualisation of the Museum 4.0. Its primary objective is to actively engage visitors in co-creating cultural and creative tourism experiences during their visit, with a focus on technological-led interaction. Additionally, the framework is rooted in the principles of creative tourism, emphasizing active participation, learning, creative self-expression, co-creation, and community engagement.