Research On The Impact Of Familiarity On Food Tourism Experience Quality

This research takes Zhaoxing Dong Village as a study case, in Liping County, in the South East of Guizhou Province, measuring travelers’ familiarity of the destination’s food and their satisfaction of the food, in order to find out whether the familiarity will affect the satisfaction or not. Based on the result, this research will provide some suggestion to those destinations well-known as food, on food tourism development and experience management.Based on theoretical basis and empirical research, in the first stage, the research adopted the method of literature research, by reviewing, collecting and analyzing the articles, to obtain related research theory, methodology and even information of the study case. In the second stage, the investigator conducted field work, sorting out the main factors contributing to food tourism experience, by direct observation, field interview and literature review. This stage paves the road to the next step, the design of the questionnaire survey. After finishing designing the questionnaire, the investigator went to the case study place again to conduct the questionnaire survey, collecting the information of travelers’ satisfaction, familiarity and their demographic data. In the final stage, a data base would be built and the statistical tools like the software named PASW Statistics would be applied to deal with the data.Through exploratory factor analysis, the research finds out that 4 factors mainly contribute to explaining food tourism experience satisfaction, native experience, empathy factors, professional quality and atmosphere and environment. After marking the familiarity with different scores, the tourists with different familiarity can be can be divided into three groups in accordance with the scores, low familiarity, medium familiarity, and high familiarity, after which, the one-way ANOVA is applied to analyze the satisfaction of three different groups of samples. It is well concluded that the familiarity has a significant impact on native experience, empathy factors and atmosphere and environment, while it seems to have no significant impact on professional quality. Through the posteriori comparisons, the researcher finds out the way the familiarity affects the native experience is like a gentle slope type, while it is like a cut line type when it comes to the empathy, and it is like a groove type when the familiarity affects the atmosphere and environment. Based on the conclusion above, this research put up with some suggestions for the case study place, such as to conduct integrated marketing communications with new media, to manage the files of travelers’ familiarity according to the concept of big data, and to design the personalized food tourism experience for travelers in different levels of familiarity.This study chose the food tourism experience quality as the research content, which only a few former research involve in, and took a first step to apply familiarity, a psychological concept to the research of tourism experience of food. Based on the analysis of how familiarity affects the quality of food tourism experience, this research issued some suggestions to put theory into practice. Innovation has been made not only in the choice of research field, but also in the application of methodology.