Authenticity and Locality in Heritage Tourism Planning: A Comparative Multi-Stakeholder Study across Rural, Urban, and Natural Heritage Sites

Authenticity and locality are central evaluative objects in heritage tourism planning, yet current practice often assumes that they can be adequately represented by expert indicators such as integrity, coherence, order, and manageability. This study reconceptualizes authenticity and locality as judgments formed through multiple sources of evidence and examines how planners/managers, residents/community operators, and visitors construct such judgments across three types of heritage tourism settings in China. It further asks what kinds of evidence underlie these judgments and whether a hybrid model incorporating experience-oriented evidence explains public acceptance of and support for planning schemes more effectively than a model relying on expert indicators alone. The study combines semi-structured interviews, questionnaire analysis, multi-group comparison, and structural equation modeling. The results show that authenticity and locality are shaped more strongly by experience-oriented evidence, including continuity of everyday life, local atmosphere, cultural perceptibility, and participatory engagement, than by expert-oriented evidence alone. Perceived authenticity/locality further exerts significant effects on planning legitimacy/acceptance and support intention and functions as a key mediator between evidential structure and downstream responses. The mechanism is also role-sensitive and heritage-type-sensitive. The findings suggest that an evaluation framework dominated by expert indicators alone is epistemically insufficient and that heritage tourism planning requires a dual-channel framework in which expert-oriented and experience-oriented evidence are both taken seriously.