Catering for yourself: Food experiences of self-catering tourists

Abstract

The self-catering aspects of tourism-related food consumption have not been given much research attention so far, and hence, the purpose of this article is to expand our understanding of self-catering tourists’ food experiences. Tourists’ food relations are argued to be influenced by several forces: the multi-faceted nature of the individual tourist’s demands, the group dynamics within the travelling unit and the place-specific context of the tourism activity. Qualitative interviews with a diverse group of self-catering tourists enable an explorative discussion of food experiences of self-catering tourists. The analysis demonstrates that food has an experiential potential for a broad cross-section of self-catering tourists, but also that food is considered a non-experiences by some. Tourists’ relations to food is often a combination of two or more experiences, and may equally be concerned with the consumer object (pleasure and health) and the consumer context (social bonding and sense of place).