INTERACTIONS IN CREATIVE TOURISM: RESIDENTS’ PERSPECTIVES IN UZBEKISTAN
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20720273Keywords:
creative tourism, host-guest interaction, emotional solidarity, social exchange theory, Uzbekistan, hotel suppliers.Abstract
In under a decade, tourism in Uzbekistan has moved from being a niche sector to a priority sector
of the economy. Uzbekistan 2.0 demonstrates a clear growing trend in terms of the number of tourist arrivals, as
well as their contribution to the economy under a new visa policy. The number of countries whose citizens have
visa-free access to Uzbekistan increased from 9 to 90 and led to a substantial increase in international travellers
from approximately 2.7 million under the new visa policy to almost 8.6 million people for the year and the first
nine months of 2025, representing a 112.5% increase compared to the same period in 2024 (Khodjaeva D. &
Khaydarova M., 2026; Tourism Committee of the Republic of Uzbekistan, 2025). This growth reflects increasing
international interest in active tourism and ongoing institutional reforms in the tourism sector. This qualitative
study, drawing on nine semi-structured interviews, applies Social Exchange Theory (SET) and Emotional Solidarity
Theory (EST) as sensitising frameworks to reconstruct how residents and tourists make sense of their encounters.
Findings show that pace and attention, not language, determine interaction quality; that suppliers hold a principled
line between format adaptation and loss of design identity; and that the hotel mediates a “filtered authenticity” that
removes market pressure but eliminates the relational substrate of creative tourism.
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