Gastronomic events as creative tourism experiences: the national gastronomy festival, Santarém

• Autor(a) principal: Cardoso, Marta dos Santos
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11960/1131

Current studies on market trends and tourism development strategies demonstrate a change in paradigm, where tourists increasingly search for new and improved experiences in which they could engage, unique of the place they are visiting and distinctive by their nature. In order to ensure its competitiveness, in light of and extremely volatile market environment, destinations seek new forms of tourism development, so as to meet the new tourists’ needs, motivations and desires. This caused a detachment from the previously applied strategies, primarily focused on heritage mining, where the tourist was regarded as a passive element. In this sense, strategies based on creativity as an extension of cultural tourism, are being put into practice by many destinations, where the need for the superiority of the experience is recognized. This research focused on a traditional gastronomy event with 32 years of tradition, the National Gastronomy Festival in Santarém. A visitor survey has been undertaken, in the year 2012, with the aim of understanding main perception of the visitors with regard to their experience at the event, and in order to understand to which extent the foundations of a creative development are being put into practice at the festival, given their importance on the current marketplace. A total of 278 questionnaires were applied to the visitors of the festival, chosen through a non-probabilistic convenience sampling method. Results demonstrate that, although the festival is still cherished by the visitors, the current static design of the festival is not working, unveiling therefore a decline tendency for the future of the festival.Moreover, its format cannot be considered creative, either within its space, or in regard to its involvement with the city, since little to no effects caused by the festival are, in fact, felt within the region.