Abstract:

Abstract The gastronomic experience is a comprehensive phenomenon with sensory, emotional, mental and social dimensions that includes, but is not limited to, food consumption. Gastronomy experience basically refers to the experiences of tourists related to gastronomic products and activities during their travels. In the gastronomy literature, the number of studies that analyse the co-creation and co-design of gastronomic experiences is very few. With this study, it is aimed to draw attention to this gap, to determine how local gastronomic products and gastronomic experiences are used in package tours and how much space they occupy. For this purpose, document analysis, one of the data collection techniques, was used. Content analysis was used in the analysis of a total of 368 tour programs obtained from the websites of tour companies. According to the findings, tours with gastronomic content are given more weight in TUI UK than Thomas Cook and the activities that require the active participation of tourists the most and the least special events are included in the tours. On the other hand, building/structure and site visits, in which the tourists are more passive, took a more dominant place in the tour programs.

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