Performing Heritage: Hospitality as Social Practice at The Phoenix Hotel Yogyakarta

Abstract

Sustainable tourism discourse increasingly emphasizes cultural and historical sustainability alongside environmental and economic dimensions. Within this framework, heritage hotels are often positioned as entrepreneurial ventures that preserve historical assets while generating experiental value. However, existing scholarship largely approaches heritage hospitality as a matter of architectural conservation or experiental consumtion, paying limited attention to the everyday practices through which heritage and history is enacted and sustained. Addressing this gap, this study reconceptualizes heritage hosptitality as form of social performance, examining how heritage experience are produced. Drawing on performance theory and social practices approaches, this qualitative case study investigates how heritage and history is staged and negotiated at The Phoenix Hotel Yogyakarta. Data were generated through in-depth interviews with guests and hotel staff, non-participant observation of service encounters and spatial arragements. The findings reveal that heritage is not merely embedded in colonial architecture and Chinese-Javanese decoratif motifs, rather, it is actively performed through narative framing of the past, and the aesthetic choreography of space. These practices construct a coherent atmosphere of mix culture elegance shaping guests, affective engagement and reinforcing the hotel’s experiential value proposition. By positioning hospitality  as a site of cultural and historical performance, this study contributes to sustainable tourism debates bu highlighting how cultural and historical heritage is maintained through everyday entrepreneurial practices. It advances a practice-oriented understanding of heritage historical sustainability and demonstrates hospitality experiental value in heritage historical hospitality is socially contructed, enacted, and sustained within the micro-dynamics of service encounters in a Global South context.