Food tourism and storytelling - a conceptual framework

Food tourism is embracing all over the world the existing rich storytelling traditions. It is now agreed that food tourism enhances the reputation of places, regions and/or countries and helps them to gain a competitive advantage. This article examines the growing importance of food tourism and its relationship with local stories and traditions. The originality of this study resides in the fact that it provides a conceptual framework that can be helpful both to academics and practitioners when theorising about or developing food tourism through storytelling. Being conceptual, our study resorted to a semi-systematic literature review, both to analyse and to structure food tourism and storytelling, but also because this is a very broad field full of designs, concepts, and methods. In the end, a multi-dimensional conceptual framework is presented. One of the main challenges of today in the services sector when associated with food tourism is quality and customers´satisfaction. Results point out that consuming food is also about consuming stories and that storytelling enhances the experience lived by food tourists. This study also through our conceptual framework is contributing both to advance scientific knowledge and has also clear practical implications. However, quantitative or mixed studies must be made to test our model, Being exploratory in nature, our conceptual framework still needs to be tested in food tourism when linked to storytelling.

Food tourism and storytelling - a conceptual framework Conference Paper