VISITOR MOTIVATION AND LOCAL FOOD

Exploring the motives that drive visitors to do their travel behavior is important for research. Previous research explaining visitor motivation suggests that visitors tend to choose destinations that will satisfy their needs and desires. While defining visitor motivation, it is difficult to explain why instead of where, when, where and how. The difficulty of answering “why” is that the wishes, needs, cultures and the behavior and direction of visitors’ inner motivations are different. Local foods, which are now among the travel reasons, have become an important part of gastronomic tourism. There is a close relationship between local foods and gastronomy tourism, which are among the alternative tourism types. The notion of visitor, including day-trippers and tourists, represents the majority of participants in gastronomy tourism. Local food and drinks can be an attraction for a region. Basically, local foods are foods that are specific to a particular region and producing, cooking, consuming, serving and tastes are different in every region. In order to assess the consumption of local foods in the context of gastronomic tourism, it is necessary that the main travel reason should be food. In this review, initially, the concept of motivation was given, and then, local food and gastronomy concepts were emphasized