Experiential food tourism in Greece: the case of Central Greece

ABSTRACT

Many touristic enterprises organize and offer staged experiences in order to achieve client sustainability. The present study aims to examine in which extent the environment aesthetics, emotions, experiential participation, price, and authenticity affect the tourist’s experience on Greek cooking classes. Moreover, is examined the effect of tourist’s experiences that results in their image modification about the touristic destinations. For this study, e-questionnaires were sent to 500 tourists that participated in experiential culinary activities in agrotourism farms in central Greece. 289 useful questionnaires were collected and analysed based on Confirmative Factor Analysis (CFA). This study asserts that tourist’s experiences effect on destination’s image modification indirectly via satisfaction.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourism experience
• local food
• agritourism
• satisfaction
• memorability
• destination image

Acknowledgments

The authors are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Meletios Andrinos

Meletios Andrinos is a researcher in the University of Thessaly, Greece. His research interests are in tourism experience, tourism satisfaction, destination image and tourism psychology

Theodore Metaxas

Theodore Metaxas is an Associate Professor of Economic Development, Greece. He has more than 60 publications in qualified academic journals such as European Planning Studies, Sustainability, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Journal of Developing Areas, Resources Policy, Journal of Economic Asymmetries, Economics of Governance, Business History, Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, Evolutionary and Institutional Economic Review, while he is also a reviewer in more of 20 academic peer review journals

Marie-Noëlle Duquenne

Marie Noëlle Duquenne Professor in “Statistical and Econometric Methods for Spatial Analysis”, University of Thessaly, Polytechnic School, Department of Planning and Regional Development, Greece. She has more than 20 years’ academic experience and 35 years of research experience, participating in about 65 research programmes funded by E.U. and other international institutions (EU, Eurostat, World Bank, etc) both in Greece as in Balkan and African countries