A Novel Research Methodology for Gastronomic Blogs

Blogs are effective on spreading eWOM to provide hospitality and tourism promoters and different from traditional ones, but has big potential to create enormous impact on hospitality or tourism promotion.Although the growth rate of blogs is impressive, less research effort has been devoted to investigating the influence of gastronomy blogs. Assessing gastronomy blogs from readers’ perspective can be a great value to both researchers and practitioners and it can be useful to researchers in developing and testing theories relating to gastronomy blogs, enable researchers to justify gastronomy blogs as an effective way in the context of hospitality marketing, and help to understand the drivers behind gastronomy blogs to drive readers’ behavioral intention. By developing such a study, restaurant executives is able to better justify their web-based promotional activities if they devote a significant portion of their organizational budgets to these activities, as well as to understand how to use gastronomy blogs as part of their business strategies for greater culinary destination promotion. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to explore the novel research methodology deriving from gastronomy blogs influenced blog readers’ behavioral intention to taste local gastronomy.