INTERACTIONS IN CREATIVE TOURISM: RESIDENTS’ PERSPECTIVES IN UZBEKISTAN

Dildora Khodjaeva Mukhamedkhodjaevna and Jasmin Raxmidinova

GREEN ECONOMY AND DEVELOPMENT, 2026, vol. 4, issue 6

Abstract: In under a decade, tourism in Uzbekistan has moved from being a niche sector to a priority sectorof the economy. Uzbekistan 2.0 demonstrates a clear growing trend in terms of the number of tourist arrivals, aswell as their contribution to the economy under a new visa policy. The number of countries whose citizens havevisa-free access to Uzbekistan increased from 9 to 90 and led to a substantial increase in international travellersfrom approximately 2.7 million under the new visa policy to almost 8.6 million people for the year and the firstnine 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 increasinginternational interest in active tourism and ongoing institutional reforms in the tourism sector. This qualitativestudy, drawing on nine semi-structured interviews, applies Social Exchange Theory (SET) and Emotional SolidarityTheory (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 principledline between format adaptation and loss of design identity; and that the hotel mediates a “filtered authenticity” thatremoves market pressure but eliminates the relational substrate of creative tourism.

Keywords: creative tourism; host-guest interaction; emotional solidarity; social exchange theory; Uzbekistan; hotel suppliers. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:teu:ged000:v:4:y:2026:i:6:id:11041

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20720273

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