The Road to a Tourist’s Heart is Through Their Stomach: Exploring Culinary Tourist Motivation in Zimbabwe

The paper explores culinary tourist motivation (CTM) as a unique behaviour that is portrayed by a guest. The study is linked to the ethnic Zimbabwean cuisine and the desire to taste new gastronomy experiences offered by the destination. Dimensions such as culinary symbolic, culinary obligation, guest contrast and guest pleasure with their sub-dimensions are used to investigate CTM. An empirical research study was conducted. Self-administered questionnaires were distributed at designated ethnic restaurants in Harare, Kariba, Mutare/Nyanga and Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. Convenience sampling was used to collect 500 responses from June until August 2018. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted using IBM SPSS (V24.0). Results from the factor analysis for CTM on the four dimensions yielded Bartlett's test of sphericity X2 = 2588.57 (df = 105; ρ ≤ 0.001) and KMO-MSA (0.93) supporting the overall significance of the correlations. The two factors were retained for the development of the CTM scale based on the number of eigenvalues larger than unity, which explained 86.01% of the variance in the factor space, and α = 0.84. Inter-correlations between these factors were further investigated using the Pearson correlation where Factor D1 (guest pleasure) and Factor D2 (authenticity) (r = 0.72, n = 500, ρ ≤ 0.001) had a large effect size to support the newly developed CTM. These results may benefit destination planners and policymakers on the importance of guest pleasure and authenticity in the designing of their marketing strategies and policies in motivating tourists to eat at traditional restaurants.