The Influence of Personal Involvement on Festival Attendees’ Revisit Intention: Food and Wine Attendees’ Perspective

Abstract

Research on food and wine tourism is recent and mostly attraction-based. Further, it is essential to understand how locally grown food and beverages allow culinary tourists to amplify their involvement experiences and lead to enhance their satisfaction and destination loyalty. This research attempts to explore the structural relationships between the variables of motivation, different types of involvement, physical/intangible service satisfaction, and loyalty in the context of a food and wine festival. Data were collected via intercept surveys on site, which were distributed to and collected from attendees of the Wine and Food Festival in Miami, Florida. The results show that novelty seeking is only positively related to pleasure experience, whereas socialization motivation has an impact on pleasure experience, risk probability, and risk importance. Pleasure experience, in turn, has a positive influence on both physical and intangible service satisfaction; however, risk probability is only related to physical service, and risk importance is related to intangible service satisfaction. Finally, only the satisfaction with an intangible service has a positive impact on loyalty. Findings from this study suggest that developing a marketing strategy for attendees based on the characteristic of their cognitive mode can be effective in increasing their satisfaction and willingness to revisit the festival.