Food Tourism, an exploratory study in the Portuguese context

Abstract

Gastronomy and Wines has been a premium food tourism product of the national destination management organization (Tourism of Portugal) since its first National Strategic Plan for Tourism, to the present one with growing visibility and food awards. However, international research points out the emergent need to have in-depth knowledge of this industry, namely on the numerous given denominations and its potential segmentations on the food tourist demand. The main objective of this study is to clarify the nomination for this tourism sector in Portugal and to identify potential food tourism demand segmentations, paired up with the restaurant industry. To this, and due to the present pandemics, an innovative exploratory methodology was created for a food expert focus group, adapted to an online format, using visual stimuli and a computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software. The findings show that, although there was not a general agreeance in the renaming of the tourist food related activities, there was a consensus in the proposed four restaurant typologies and its hypothetical tourist demand segmentation, as presented on intermediate results section. Also, emerged the need for future research on the main food tourist demand markets in Portugal, thus being presented in the last section of this study a structured proposal for the coming research.  

Keywords| Food tourism in Portugal, food tourism demand, food tourism market segmentation, tourist restaurant industry, gastronomy tourism