Abstract
ABSTRACT Gastronomy tourism is a niche area of heritage tourism and attending cooking classes to learn about and engage in food preparation is a popular form of gastronomy tourism. Many cooking schools have come up in tourist destinations all over the world in many forms such as part of homestay accommodation, home-based cooking classes, professional culinary schools and small restaurants offering cooking lessons along with dining. This study aims to explore tourists’ experiences related to cooking classes in Cinque Terre using the experiential framework proposed by Kim, Ritchie and McCormick in their article “Development of a scale to measure memorable tourism experiences” published in Journal of Travel Research 51(1). A content analysis of the online reviews of the Cinque Terre Cooking Schools on TripAdvisor was carried out using the aforementioned experiential framework. Findings indicate that four of the dimensions of the tourist experience framework were considered significant by the participants of the cooking classes, namely involvement, hedonism, local culture and knowledge and that often these dimensions overlap creating inextricable and complex bonds between them. The study contributes to the literature on third-generation gastronomy tourism experiences, focusing on tourists’ participation in interactive foodscapes in cooking classes in Cinque Terre.
Highlights
Gastronomy tourism is one of the niche areas of heritage tourism (Timothy & Ron, 2013)
Gastronomy tourism is a niche area of heritage tourism and attending cooking classes to learn about and engage in food preparation is a popular form of gastronomy tourism
Content analysis of online reviews of the cooking schools in Cinque Terre was carried out to gain an insight into the experiences of gastronomy tourists, who participated in cooking classes
Summary
Gastronomy tourism is one of the niche areas of heritage tourism (Timothy & Ron, 2013). Gastronomy is about appreciating the connection between food and host culture (Everett, 2012). As Long (2014) notes, savouring the food of others is part of experiencing their culture. People with a strong interest in gastronomy engage in eating the local food and in its preparation and researching culinary heritage (Boesen et al, 2017). Tourists travel in search of embodied holiday experiences and the local cuisines of destinations form a major ingredient of such experiences (Everett, 2012). The cuisine of a destination is an important determinant of the quality of the holiday experience (UNWTO, 2012). Gastronomy answers tourists’ need for experiencing the authentic culture (Walter, 2017) and is a way of participating in serious leisure (Prayag et al, 2020)
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