engleski

Contribution of food products in creating cultural identity of tourist destination

Very well informed and globally oriented new customers are looking for high quality products and new experiences able to satisfy their needs and wishes. Generally, food is not the main but certainly a very important motive to visit a tourist destination. Food products become a source of pleasure and an unavoidable element in creating authentic and unique traveling experience. The aim of this paper is to accentuate changing customer behaviour on tourist market, i.e. the trend toward increased consumption of typical food products, and then explore tourist satisfaction with these products. Typical food products are reflecting historical, local and cultural specific qualities of particular place, and therefore could be regarded as gastronomic tourism resources that enable tourism development. Special attention is given to specific features of typical food products and their contribution in creating local and cultural identity of tourist destination. Due to dynamic and turbulent changes on tourist market, the approach to customer satisfaction has been changed. Tourists are evaluating tourist products not only during the consumption process, but also after this process. After buying tourist products, the consumer compares them with its own expectations, and dependable on his level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction develop positive or negative worth of mouth. Tourist satisfaction with the quality and price of tourist products could lead to positive word of mouth and have implication on repeated tourist visit, and consequently be considered as important element in achieving higher level of tourism development. Istrian County as one of the most developed tourist region in the Republic of Croatia has been used by the authors as a case study. The survey took place in many hotels, camping, private accommodations and restaurants from June to August 2005. Based on research findings the authors suggest some guidelines in the field of food marketing that would be in the function of tourism development.

food products; cultural identity; tourist destination

: Indeksirano u sljedećim bazama: ISI (Thomson Reuters), ELSEVIER, SCOPUS, ACM - Association for Computing Machinery, Zentralblatt MATH, British Library, EBSCO, SWETS, EMBASE, CAS - American Chemical Society, EI Compendex, Engineering Village, DoPP, GEOBASE, Biobase, TIB|UB - German National Library of Science and Technology, American Mathematical Society (AMS), Inspec - The IET, Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory (http://www.wseas.us/indexes/).