Abstract
Food souvenirs are tangible reminders of a travel destination and play an important role in the hospitality and tourism industry. However, little research has been devoted to the definition, attributes, and impact of food souvenirs on tourist attitudes, and post-purchase behavioural intentions, which consists of intention to repurchase, recommend, say something positive, and repurchase even if the price increased. In a response to the identified gap, this study inspects the dimensions of food souvenirs and assesses its impact on tourist satisfaction and behavioural intentions. This study applies exploratory factor analysis to identify the dimensions of food souvenirs and uses multiple regression to assess the association between these food souvenir dimensions and tourist satisfaction and post purchase intensions. The data was collected from 252 domestic tourists in Bandung, Indonesia. The factor analysis produced five dimensions of food souvenirs, including brand and packaging, uniqueness, food quality, authenticity, and taste/value. Among these dimensions; uniqueness, authenticity, taste/value are important determinants of satisfaction with food souvenir itself, but also with behavioural intentions. Further, this study reveals that satisfaction with food souvenir is a critical driver of tourist satisfaction with visiting the destination. These results offer an opportunity for retail businesses managers and destination organisation managers to develop strategy to satisfy tourists by providing unique and locally symbolic food souvenirs.
Highlights
Souvenirs play an important role for tourists and the tourism industry
As this study focuses on tourist purchasing food souvenir, the sampling method applied in this study was purposive sample method
These results show that the hypothesised relationship between tourist perceptions of food souvenirs and their satisfaction with the food souvenir (H1) is partially supported
Summary
Souvenirs play an important role for tourists and the tourism industry. First, souvenirs tend to arouse meaningful memories of the unique experience from visiting a destination (Lin & Mao, 2015). There is growing empirical evidence of the predictive power of these souvenir elements, but far the studies have been limited to predicting their choice and purchase Their role in the larger tourism experience is a natural direction for this research and the following sub-sections discuss the likely expansion paths, including possible effect of food souvenirs on customer satisfaction, and post-purchase behaviour. Literature suggests that a customer’s experience with product and services affects customer satisfaction, and customer satisfaction affects his or her post-consumption behaviours (Chen & Chen, 2010; Suhartanto, 2016) Tourists satisfied with their product or service purchases and overall experience with the visit may increase their intention to revisit, endorse potential customers, and provide positive word-of-mouth about the destination. The tourist satisfaction with the food souvenir and the visit used a 5-point semantic differential
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