The power and potential of developing food tourism

An interview with the Culinary Tourism Alliance

“There’s a lot of power and potential in developing food tourism.”

That’s one of my favorite quotes from a recent conversation we had with Valerie Keast of the Culinary Tourism Alliance.

In this brief interview about agritourism, culinary tourism, and the overlap of the two, we touched on a number of important subjects, including:

• How and why to define what food tourism means to your destination

• Why friendly coopetition is important in a destination

• Why food trails are such a powerful marketing tool

• What it means for you to be business ready vs. market ready

• When responsibilities businesses have to promote themselves, and how they can work with their DMOs

Click below to watch this information-packed interview with Valerie Keast, then keep scrolling to see an excerpt of our interview.

From someone who has little tourism experience to the point they can be included in a touristic route, do you have a rule of thumb for how they can think about development process?

When we’re thinking of promoting someone, we often think of the term market readiness. It’s not one set thing. We do have criteria and we make recommendations on what it can look like and a checklist operators can go through to see where they are.

We like to think about it more like a spectrum. On one side you have business ready and on the other side you have market ready. At business ready, basically it means, are you open for business, do you have a visitor-facing experience you’re offering, can somebody look you up online and do you have regular posted hours and you’re actually open at those hours?

On the other side, we have the market ready. That can mean everything from being ready to be marketed through travel trade. A really unique experience, strong marketing, strong message, working closely with the DMO, and finding ways to make it easier for them to make it easier to promote you, your product, and your business.

It’s a spectrum.

When we’re thinking of a timeline, projects can get off the ground really quickly. It depends on what you’re working with. You don’t need to feel that you need to start and aim straight for being travel trade market ready. A lot of the time we encourage businesses to try new experiences and iterate. It can take only a few months to get started.

With the cycle or seasonality of your specific experience, it could take up to a year. It depends on you and your business.

When talking about regular business hours for a tourism project, does that take practice to get right for those not used to having a storefront or an office?

It is something we run into a lot and like to underscore it.

When visitors are planning their trips, they’re doing a lot of research online beforehand. They’ll be trying to plan their itinerary and getting a sense on when they can stop by your business.

We understand, too, that it can be challenging, especially over the past couple of years through the pandemic, when they’re short-staffed or there are a lot of things going on if you’re a small owner-operator to maintain those regular hours. It is one crucial thing to help make it easier for a visitor to stop by.

A lot of times businesses could be overlooked if the visitor when they’re planning doesn’t have confidence that you’ll be open they might look to a different business.

That’s what we talk about on the spectrum. If you’re open for business or if you’re market ready. If you are advertising your hours and committed to being open to those times, maybe a year in advance, it makes it a lot easier for tour operators to include you in one of their packages.

How do you see the balance between individual projects and what they should be expected to contribute to the region and the larger groups that manage the region?

Think about it this way. When a visitor plans a trip, do they consider a destination because of one business, or are they more likely to go if there’s a cluster of businesses or experiences within a region?

Basically, it involves efforts on both sides. At business level and destination level and how they work together.

At the operator level, things that you can be doing include innovating and creating unique experiences, things that complement your neighbors. There is competition at the regional level among businesses among what they’re offering. It’s about offering a lot of types of tastes or experiences from visitors. 

We like to call it friendly coopetition.

I encourage the idea of businesses getting to know their neighbors, creating partnerships with others, cross-promoting, and that type of thing. Being authentic to themselves. Their story. Presenting their story in a dynamic light, sharing that story and that message succinctly and clearly. But also through their online presence and their marketing.

Also to find ways to tie it into the grander narrative or marketing efforts that the destination marketing organization is doing.

At the destination level, some of their responsibilities fall into making investments, capacity building, supporting businesses to create new experiences, to have that cluster of dynamic things to experience, then finding ways to fill some gaps, tie it into other tourism or other economics development, infrastructure investments, and also developing tourism products, marketing products, and things like that.

It’s a collective effort. For the businesses, the best thing they can do is get to know their local DMO, who’s in the office, become comfortable reaching out to them, letting them know what you’re doing at the operator level, and vice versa.

DMOs exist to promote businesses in their region. The best thing they can do is build community, bring stakeholders together, and really get involved. 

I know it’s not easy  when you’re a small business owner. You have a million things on your mind all the time. It can seem like one extra thing you have to do. That’s why DMO, destination management organizations or destination marketing organizations, exist. It’s to alleviate some of that work in marketing your business. Simply reaching out could save you a lot of effort in the long run.

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Click here to watch the rest of the interview, or here to read the rest of the transcript.

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We send our thanks again to Valerie Keast and the Culinary Tourism Alliance!

Warmly,
Alex + Joseph