The Food Tourist is an essential addition to the academic repertoire for researchers, educators, and professionals in the fields of tourism, hospitality, and gastronomy. Its innovative perspectives and unparalleled insights are sure to inspire new avenues of research and elevate the discourse surrounding food and beverage tourism.

The Food Tourist delves into the understanding of the food and beverage tourist as an established area of research and provides a comprehensive, holistic approach to the complexity of food tourist profiling as a new contribution to the field. The book is divided into fourteen chapters (including introduction and conclusion) that discuss the typologies of food tourists based on the understanding of tourists’ motivations and experiences. This is particularly relevant in the context of planning and development of destination attraction factors and the management and marketing of food experiences as a pathway to increase the competitiveness of destinations. These experiences are diverse, and encapsulate cultural and natural factors, engaging visitors with a place through its people and customs.

Editors Francesc Fusté-Forné and Erik Wolf explore the dietary and health needs of food tourists, and expand on previous research with a mixture of conceptual and empirical chapters written by leading academics and practitioners. The result is a detailed account of customer segmentation in food tourism research which has not been earlier explored in a single book.

Francesc Fusté-Forné holds a PhD in Tourism (University of Girona, Spain) and a PhD in Communication (Ramon Llull University). He is associate professor at the Department of Business, University of Girona, lecturer at the Open University of Catalonia and researcher at the Sustainability and Resilience Institute New Zealand. He is undertaking research on culinary and rural heritages from a marketing and travel perspective. Particularly, he focuses on the food tourism phenomenon, making connections among food identities, landscapes, regional development, rural activities, street food, and tourist experiences. He also conducts applied research on the role of gastronomy in relation to mass media and as a driver of social changes.

Erik Wolf is recognized as the founder of the modern food tourism industry and the World Food Travel Association. He is a highly-sought speaker, thought leader, strategist and consultant, in the US and abroad, on food and drink tourism issues, and is considered the goto resource on food and beverage tourism for a wide variety of media outlets that include CNN, the BBC, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, NBC, Forbes, Click by Booking.com, PeterGreenberg.com, Huffington Post, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and many more. He advises leading global brands such as World Travel Market, Absolut, American Express, Disney, Marriott and Royal Caribbean, and organizations such as UNESCO and UNWTO. His articles, research and books have been translated into dozens of languages.