Marketing strategy planning for Culinary Tourism in the case of Asian Countries

The researchers interviewed 11 agent professionals in the culinary tourism field from Hong-Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Australia in either English and Mandarin to gather data on their culinary culture and to distinguish culinary tourism development procedures in order to get comprehensive information for crosschecking. The following questions were given:

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  Analyze the competitive advantage whereas creating culinary tourism in your country.
  
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  Depict the concrete methodologies that are employed to advance the culinary tourism in your nation. With this approach, which are the key effective procedures or factors?
  
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  What benefits has your nation received from advancing culinary tourism? Have there been any negative effects?
  
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  Why do you advance tourism through dietary culture? What are the focuses of implementation? Too, what is the picture of the food?
  

According to the results, the main point which most interviewees claimed is that to improve an effective culinary tourism industry, culinary resources should support culinary culture. To be more exactly, culinary resources are local software and hardware facilities, consumer events and related organizations and systems to encourage the arranging and management of future promoting activities.

Facilities for culinary tourism contains destinations such as farmer markets, food stores, restaurants and farms. These vital places, which have long been considered an important tourist activity in Taiwan, are where tourists buy culinary products and make them attractive culinary resources.

Activities in cuisine tourism industry means food service facilities. In Adelaide, these activities are important sources of economic income. Additional activities, which Singapore and Thailand support, are cooking classes, attending in formal wine testing and reading books related to food.

Events such as carnivals or festivals should be considered as resources in Australia to strengthen the field.

Organizations related to culinary tourism at culinary tourist destinations can serve as stakeholders to examine the efficacy of local resources and service quality. In Korea organization such as “Slow Food Association” apply restaurants evaluation criteria, beverage standards and establishes associations focusing on culinary heritage and lifestyles.

To adopting marketing strategies to promote culinary cultural sectors researchers recommend to build the image of culinary tourist destination, because image building is important to increase the value of products and market identity such as “Singapore: the Food Capital Asia” illustrating the divers Singaporean food culture.

To package products to focus on the target market of culinary tourism tourists must have a good overall experience. For example, Tourism Australia hire professional survey agencies to conduct detailed surveys by the phone or e-mail and interviews.

And also, promotion and mass media publication plays a major role to plan and integrate market strategy for culinary tourist destination. Possible marketing ways involve pamphlets, guidebooks, websites, advertisements, broadcast, TV Media and publications (e.g. Boyne and Hall,2004) For instance, The Macao Government Tourist Office established “What’s On” which provides channel for inform about events to motivate tourists to visit.

The interview results detected that all activities related to culinary tourism should cooperate with economic activities. Food may be one item in the economy, however the marketing of food is the most vital part in tourism which requires tourist’s time, money and attention.

In addition, educational environment for culinary tourism is also important in tourism industry. Interviews also claimed that to general practice and management classes, hospitality knowledge must involve a classes in cuisines and cultural as the way for students to know history and culture of cuisines.

Conclusion

Taking everything into consideration, stakeholders and tour agents should focus on internal resources. The first point should be claimed is that a country should identity its major culinary tourism resources. The second point is that governments should connect their policies and marketing strategy. Third, the culinary tourist destinations must be able to consume resources efficiently to design package products. Meanwhile, education is an important part of strategy for making tourism sustainable.

By identifying the keys success factors in Asian Countries such as Australia, Hong-Kong, Korea, Macao, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand, we can identify the promotional strategic improvement structure of culinary tourism. According to the results, the developing countries in culinary tourism destination should first identify and consume their resources in culinary tourism. At the same time, should be able to assess the government ability for promoting tourism. And then, they should organize educational environment related to culinary tourism.

Examination of the key success variables in culinary tourism benchmark nations from the RBT viewpoint reveals that to maintain the same competitive within the tourism advertise, the nations or tourist destinations must make the most excellent utilize of the heterogeneity inside their center resources, including facilities, activities, events and organizations. Subsequently, governments ought to develop a database of culinary tourist destination resources for future strategy arranging and management.

However, the governments should not forget that they have responsibilities to provide value for improving culinary tourism to prove what attractions the planning culinary tourists should visit. After that the marketing strategy would have sufficient support to achieve the efficient economic effect.
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