Luxury food tour: Perspectives and dilemmas on the »luxurification« of local culture in tourism product

Abstract

This paper focuses on the Kras/Carso Food Tour to present the challenges of developing a luxury tourism product. The tour’s design followed the current strategy of the Slovenian Tourist Board, which defines specific criteria for a luxury experience. Contextualized by the experiential trends in tourism, the paper juxtaposes the bottom-up and top-down perspectives on luxury experiences. The authors argue that mediation by experts familiar with academic discourses and local culture is beneficial for the development of a successful tourism product. The study contributes to the debates on luxury tourism, which have neglect-ed bottom-up perceptions in tourist discourse and overlooked the dilemmas people face when »luxurifying« their traditions and heritage practices.