Holidays Abroad and the Eating Behavior of the Inhabitants of Poland

Abstract

A hotel is interested that the guest buys from it not only accommodation, but also catering services, preferably an all-inclusive option. However, many tourists choose only accommodation or accommodation with breakfast, and dinners and other things are purchased outside the place of accommodation. Therefore, it is important to know the eating behavior of tourists, and what hotels must do to make guests want to use food services at the place of accommodation. The purpose of this article is to show the reasons for not buying full meals at hotels during vacations by the inhabitants of Poland. The study used the diagnostic survey method with the help of the direct survey technique. A proprietary survey questionnaire was developed. The direct survey was conducted among 3071 tourists across the country. The study was conducted in 2019–2020. For data analysis, a discriminant function was chosen to examine the differences between groups based on a set of selected independent variables. When buying tourist holidays in travel agencies, 32.40% of Poles bought the all-inclusive option, 33.15% bought breakfast and dinner, 12.47% bought breakfast only, while 21.98%, bought accommodation without any food. For tourists who did not buy any meals at the hotel, the most important factors for eating out were mainly unwillingness to adapt to the hours of serving meals at the place of accommodation, and the desire to control the quality of raw materials needed for preparation of individual dishes. Among hotel guests who only had breakfast at the hotel, the main reasons for eating lunch and dinner outside of the hotel were the desire to try local dishes in regional restaurants, to get to know different restaurants, and to eat meals made entirely of ecological materials. A big barrier to buying meals in a hotel was the lack of offering dietetic dishes or their too high price. Older people dined out because of the lack of dietary dishes or their too high price and because they look for restaurants that serve meals prepared from ecological ingredients. Younger people, on the other hand, did not dine at the hotel because they did not want the hours of serving meals at the hotel to limit their sightseeing in the city and surroundings.