Effects of Tourists’ Street Food Experience and Food Neophobia on Their Post-Travel Behaviors: The Roles of Destination Image and Corona-Phobia

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ABSTRACT Food-neophobia is referred to as the reluctance to try unknown foods. This paper aims to demonstrate the relationships between street food experience, food destination image, food-neophobia, corona-phobia, and post-travel behaviors (e.g., intention to revisit and word-of-mouth) of international tourists visiting Istanbul, Türkiye. Based on the 210 valid questionnaires, Smart-PLS was applied to empirically test a structural equation model using PLS-Henseler’s multi-group analysis. The results demonstrated relationships between the effects of street food experience and food neophobia on tourists’ post-travel behaviors in terms of mediating effect of destination image and the moderating effect of corona-phobia. The result also showcased the moderated mediation role of corona-phobia in mediating role of food destination image between street food experience, revisit intention, and word-of-mouth. Despite existing generic tourists’ street food studies and the popularity of COVID-19-related studies in the destination-marketing context, there have been limited attempts to explore the consequences (e.g., tourists’ post-travel behavior) of the tourists’ street food experience with the possible psychological relationships (i.e., food destination image and food-neophobia) during the pandemic. Therefore, this is one of the first attempts to troubleshoot to fill this omitted gap. Several practical implications with suggestions for further studies were also discussed.