Resumen de Local cuisine image dimensions and its impact on foreign tourist’s perceived food contentment in Delhi

Vikas Gupta, Hiran Roy, Pornpisanu Promsivapallop

• This study intends to determine the dimensions of local cuisine image by classifying the vital cuisine traits that are used by foreign tourists for their local food assessment; and inspect any variances in the perceived local cuisine image of Eastern and Western tourists (based on their country’s geographical position from India). It applied multivariate and descriptive statistics for analysing the data of 419 foreign tourists in Delhi. 24 factor items were used to measure the tourist’s perceived image of local cuisine which were subjected to Exploratory Factor Analysis in order to reduce them into a smaller set of underlying constructs. Results indicated that all the foreign tourists were very much satisfied with their overall food experiences in Delhi. Further, they also positively evaluated four perceptual/cognitive dimensions of local cuisine, i.e. Food authenticity and culture; Emotional food image; Freshness & taste; and Nutritional value & digestibility. The dimension of Price & quality of food was found to be worst perceived amongst the foreign tourists. Overall, this study provided an improved knowledge about creating a destination cuisine image from the foreign tourists’ outlook, and how this notion can be used to efficiently market and envisage the exclusivity of a destination like India.