Name: Sara León Santana
Final Degree Project in Tourism
Reading date: July 2021
University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
Tutor: Sergio Moreno Gil
Description: Gastronomic tourism in Spain has known how to differentiate itself, becoming a clear competitor against other tourist destinations. Only 28.7% of tourists demand an experience based solely on gastronomy. However, 76.2% of Spaniards who make trips expect to enjoy the gastronomy of the destination, so it becomes an indirect conditioning factor (Romero, 2017).
Gastronomic tourism encompasses unique foods and that is why this research focuses on cheese. The production of dairy products and cheese is a fundamental industry in the Spanish economy (Eurostat, 2019), which makes it the ideal territory thanks to the variety of rural and mountain areas that Spain has to develop this specific type of tourism. Currently, there are multiple studies on the relationship between cheese and tourism, which confirm that it is a product that can be granted the tourism category (Fusté-Forne, 2015). As far as the study of emotions is concerned, this is a unique opportunity to discover the role they play when it comes to wanting to carry out this type of tourism or otherwise (Pelegrín-Borondo, Ortiz y Meraz-Ruiz, 2019).
Following this line of thought, the present work aimed to analyse the emotional response of tourists to cheese as a tourist product. Likewise, it tested whether the Canary Islands can be a cheese tourism destination thanks to the emotional analysis that it proposes to carry out and based on the results of an empirical study in which 33 people have participated, using the FaceCoding methodology.