Purpose This paper attempts to identify emerging themes that focus on customer experience of culinary tourism of international tourists who opted for food tours in Delhi. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses a multi-method approach for data collection. A thorough review of literature was conducted followed by gaining insights from the industry experts for the themes and a tentative thematic table was established. Thereafter, secondary data comprising 1,744 customer reviews from world’s leading travel website – Tripadvisor.com was analysed using thematic analysis. Customer’s real-time feedback and industry insights were paired together to gather meaningful and practical insights on customer experiences of food tours in Delhi. Findings Culinary tourism of Delhi is facing challenge in the areas of infrastructure, hygiene and certain preconceived notions related to brand perception of Indian cuisines. The findings of the study allude that the food tour agencies must be professional with all certifications and attention must be paid to location of food tastings, as it become the representation of Indian food worldwide. The findings also indicate customization is the key to positive customer experience, thereby requiring culinary professionals to understand the customer choices and personalize the food tours accordingly. Online reputation management is another key area requiring attention as electronic word of mouth plays a major role in the hospitality industry. Research limitations/implications Although this study corroborates valuable academic findings and practical insights, it has few limitations that can be further investigated in the future. A quantitative study can be conducted to provide deeper insights into the factors of a culinary tour resulting in positive customer experience. Secondly, this study focuses on customer experience of food tours which is one of the forms of Culinary tourism, another elaborate study can be conducted incorporating other methods of culinary tourism such as cooking classes, food festivals, events etc. and delving into insights of customer experience and challenges in those practices. Practical implications Themes ascertained in this research paper provide deeper and worthy insights to all the stakeholders which would help them use their tourism resources in best optimal manner. Findings of the study would be valuable to culinary organizations, tourism department and other researchers working in the area of culinary tourism. Also, this study can be quite valuable for the academic researchers. Suggestions of the study will help the government, culinary organizations and other stakeholders to enhance culinary tourist experiences of Delhi. Originality/value The study is original and highly appropriate to all the stakeholders to formulate suitable strategic framework to improve customer experience in the field of culinary tourism. Using real customer experiences as data and choosing thematic analysis as a method of analysis further enhance the worth of study by opening the area for further exploration.
Artificial Intelligence empowered Chatbots are altering the nature of service interfaces which has further resulted in raised expectations from Chatbots to understand customer’s social interactions and respond them within the turnaround time. To close this research gap, we conduct an exploratory study in two phases-Industry’s perspective and B2B customer’s perspective and analyse results with the help of NVIVO 12 plus and Leximancer. The findings reveal perceived risk with respect to Chatbots is high, complex pricing structure along with non-availability of testing options makes the pre purchase more complex. Moreover, interactive speed, Customization especially with respect to language issues, Integration with other platforms is some of the major themes which influence Customer Experience. Advancements in AI, natural Language processing (NLP) and more testing at all phases will bring efficiency, automation first strategies. Our findings suggest Chatbots must provide a more personalized, scalable and omni channel engagement and focus on delivering more enhanced customer experience. Chatbots must offer a grievance management dashboard where the customer can see live queries, resolved queries, present queries status etc to get transparency. Chatbots streamline the lead qualification process, greatly improve, and speed up the data collection therefore, enhancing customer experience.
Summary Artificial intelligence empowered Chatbots are altering the nature of service interfaces which has further resulted in raised expectations from Chatbots to understand customer's social interactions and respond them within the turnaround time. To close this research gap, we conduct an exploratory study in two phases‐industry's perspective and B2B customer's perspective and analyze results with the help of NVIVO 12 plus and Leximancer. The findings reveal perceived risk with respect to Chatbots is high, complex pricing structure along with nonavailability of testing options makes the pre purchase more complex. Moreover, interactive speed, customization especially with respect to language issues, integration with other platforms is some of the major themes which influence customer experience. Advancements in AI, natural language processing and more testing at all phases will bring efficiency, automation first strategies. Further, our findings suggest Chatbots must provide more personalization, scalability and omni channel engagement and focus on delivering more enhanced customer experience. Chatbots must offer a grievance management dashboard where the customer can see live queries, resolved queries, present queries status and so on to get transparency. Chatbots streamline the lead qualification process, greatly improve, and speed up the data collection therefore, enhancing customer experience.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.