Exploring gastronomic tourism experiences through online platforms: evidence from Thai local communities

ABSTRACT

Gastronomic (food) tourism is crucial for visitation and destination choices. Thailand tourism and its reputable cuisine can utilise the potential of online platforms as a channel to connect tourists to local communities. Despite massive online textual data in tourism, employing such insightful knowledge in theory and practice is still insufficient. This research explores gastronomic tourists’ experiences and their impacts on local communities in Thailand by conducting a qualitative approach to analyse local food experiences of gastronomic tourists’ reviews from five different online platforms. The results from 461 online reviews reveal positive tourists’ gastronomic experiences in Thailand. The gastronomic tourism offers and their contributions to local community destinations vary across online platforms. Additionally, all five online platforms facilitate the connection of gastronomic tourists and local people differently. In addition, the local online platforms offer a greater variety and uniqueness of gastronomic tourism experiences, including authentic food experiences, local interaction and community benefits, tailor-made cultural learning with locals, and social aspect of food that benefit local communities. This research benefits both tourism scholars and practitioners in filling the knowledge gap of employing available online tourism platforms to better understand, plan and design gastronomic tourism experiences in local communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Gastronomic tourism
• local community tourism
• online mediated platforms
• Thailand

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Uraiporn Kattiyapornpong

Uraiporn Kattiyapornpong (Ping), PhD, is a lecturer in Marketing, Faculty of Business and Law, University of Wollongong, Australia. Her research focuses on how services marketing and tourism contribute to sustainability, such as sustainable tourism development, platforms empowerment in tourism micro-entrepreneurship, gender equality in services, marketing multi-channel in services and relationship quality in social banking in Australian and international contexts. She has published in Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Technology, Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing, Journal of Vacation Marketing, etc.

Morakot Ditta-Apichai

Morakot Ditta-Apichai, PhD, has a doctorate in Tourism Management from the University of Queensland, Australia. She currently works for the College of Innovation and Management at Songkhla Rajabhat University, where she specialises in social media, tourism platforms, social commerce, micro-tourism entrepreneurship, sustainable community-based tourism, persuasion and consumer choices.

Chatchasorn Chuntamara

Chatchasorn Chuntamara, Asst Prof., has a Master’s degree in Organization Administration from the Krirk University, Thailand. She currently works for the Hotel and Restaurant Management Program, College of Tourism and Hospitality at Rangsit University where she specialises in hotel management, sustainable tourism, community-based tourism and service psychology. She is a member of the Asia Pacific Institute for Events Management (APIEM), UK since 2019.