The determinants of food festival attendees' intention to revisit

In this paper we disentangle the roles of emotional and cognitive responses in determining behavioral intentions in food and wine events. We estimate a structural equation model on a sample of 380 people attending in 2007 the food and wine festival “Friuli Doc”, allowing for direct and indirect effects of different factors on the future behavior of participants. The only significant direct effect on Behavior comes from the “emotional” factor, while “cognitive” factors have only an indirect effect. Service quality, which is the only exogenous factor directly controlled by event organizers, has a direct effect on experience quality and on perceived service value, but only indirect effects on both satisfaction and behavior. Thus, an increased service quality may have an effect on future behavior only if it changes the perception of participants about the quality of their experience or the overall value of the event.