Äta ute – en studie av besökares aktiviteter relaterad till mat-och måltider

Projektbeskrivning

Restaurant experiences are an important part of a destination’s service offer and restaurants in their turn play an important role for visitors and for inhabitants. Naturally high quality of food is essential for a restaurant customer’s experience, however this is not enough. Often feeling welcome, meeting skillful employees and enjoying the atmosphere are as important as the food served. From a destination perspective it is especially interesting to understand how visitors create value during their stay. From a restaurant and hotel company point of view it is especially interesting to further understand how their customers create value during their entire stay with a special focus on eating out. In order to understand visitors’ value creating processes during their stay at a destination it is important to know the customers’ own world of processes, activities and value creation seen from a customer perspective. These processes and activities are partly invisible for companies and destinations. Compared to earlier studies where the customer is regarded as a passive receiver of solutions, a goods-dominant-view, this project aims to treat the customer as a person who actively integrates different opportunities in order to create value in a specific context, a customer-dominant-view. The purpose of this project is to examine visitors’ activities during their stay at a place with a special focus on eating out. The focus of the study will be the customer’s perspective. Further, other aspects, contributing to customers’ value creation will be considered, for example how visitors make their choices and how bookings relating to the visit and eating out are made.
Methodologically the project will follow the recommendations made in earlier innovation research related to tourism, hospitality and service. A field study approach, including observations, interviews and field documentation will be applied. The design of the empirical study will, besides research literature, be based on the discussions from the workshops where the multidisciplinary research group and representatives from the industry will meet.
The results will illustrate the visitors’ stay in a holistic way with the customer experience in focus, in other words customers’ value creation. Theoretically the project will be developed by means of different research disciplines: service research, tourism research, research in culinary arts and meal science, informatics and design. The project will contribute to a holistic understanding of visitors’ stay at a place and the drivers beyond their actions and activities regarding eating out. The results will also contribute to the development of companies as well as destinations with regard to eating out and meals.