Abstract
The common presumption in food tourism that tourists are neophilic (seek novel taste), due to being ‘attracted’ to new food at destination, or neophobic (fear of unknown food), based on food as an ‘impediment’ (Cohen and Aveili, 2004), has recently been challenged, and it is suggested that tourists eating behaviour in uncertainty can be flexible and adaptive (Falconer, 2013). In an attempt to capture tourists’ variety seeking behaviour (VSB) in uncertainty, this study aims to explore the role of emotion and impact on Western tourists’ VSB with unfamiliar food in Malaysia. Additionally, elicitation factors of emotion are also examined. The study adopts ‘culture confusion’ and ‘affect-heurist’ theoretical constructs and extend them into a tourist food consumption framework. Semi-structured interviews incorporating Critical Incident Technique (CIT) were carried out with fourty-four independent British and German tourists (N=44) to provide experiential patterns as a linkage to explore their emotions and variety seeking experiences. The data were collected between July and August 2014 and analysed through content analysis. The findings indicated that despite tourists’ neophilic/ neophobic tendency, emotion plays a key role in directing tourists’ variety seeking behaviour with unfamiliar food. Also, impact of emotion on VSB changes across time, transforming tourists’ VSB dynamically. The findings indicate negative emotions affected perceived control negatively, which reduced VSB. Positive emotion increases perceived control, which heightened VSB. Four key factors that elicited emotions including ‘food attributes’, ‘intercultural service encounter’, ‘bodily interference’ and ‘environment and social eating’ were found. The study suggests that fast and rapid emotional affect influences Western tourists’ VSB, in their effort to reduce perceived risk and increase perceived control. Finally a conceptual model was developed to illustrate the role and impact of emotion in the transformation of Western tourists’ VSB into dynamic and fluid behaviour.