Celebrating local products: the role of food events

Visiting a food festival is an important component in the complete construct of culinary tourism. What might have motivated participants to visit such an event has become critical for tourist destinations when they attempt to use food festivals to promote regions and farmers. This article offers an integrated approach aimed at understanding event motivations. It extends the theoretical and empirical evidence on the causal relationships among the push and pull motivations, in order to determine to what extent these motivating factors contribute to the overall perception of the festival. It investigates the relevant relationships among the constructs by using a structural equation model approach. The main result is that, in the case of food and wine events, the pull factors connected with both product and territory have a considerable influence on the participants' perceptions.