Tourists’ motivation toward culinary destination choice: targeting Italian tourists

Over the last years, social and environmental issues have played an increasingly important role both for tourists’ destination choice and for the consumption of agri-food products. However, in the literature on culinary tourists’ behavior, it is not clear whether sustainability issues also affect the configuration of specific culinary tourists’ targets. This study tries to bridge this gap by carrying out a segmentation of culinary tourists in Italy, a country known worldwide for its culinary specialties. In particular, this study aims to understand whether the growing tourists’ sensitivity toward environmental and social aspects shapes specific targets of culinary tourists. The results show that in culinary tourism, sustainability plays a key role in culinary destination choice. These findings may have a twofold purpose. On the one hand, the results enrich the literature on culinary tourism by revealing that motivations linked to food sustainability could shape a specific target of culinary tourists. On the other hand, the findings provide insight and hints to entrepreneurs and managers of the hospitality and tourism sector interested in improving their performance to fully satisfy culinary tourist expectations in terms of environmental and social concerns.