A Taste of Tourism: Visitors' Motivations to Attend a Food Festival

Abstract

Food festivals can offer a whole host of sensory experiences for visitors while engaging with a destination and its people. Understanding visitors' motivations to attend a specific food festival is beneficial for both community developers and festival professionals when implementing an effective marketing strategy in order to promote the event. This study applied a festival motivation framework incorporating three interacting components as the foundation to study food festival motives. The factor analysis results revealed six delineated motivational dimensions of visitors attending a regional food festival in Texas. Findings indicated patrons attended the food festival for generic leisure and travel needs, event-specific experiences, and extrinsic motives. Marketing implications are discussed along with the findings.