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The purpose of this research is to explore extraordinary experiences of food tourists and to develop a theory of surprise in relation to a typology of food cultural capital. We draw on phenomenological interviews with sixteen food tourists. We found that food tourists experienced surprise in different ways, depending on their food cultural capital. Food tourists who possessed a high level of cultural capital were surprised by the simplicity or complexity of the experience while those possessing a low level of cultural capital were surprised by the genuinity of the experience. Thus, we make an important theoretical contribution here as we learn that the resources food tourists possessed in the form of cultural capital conditioned the ways in which they conceived an extraordinary experience. More so, using the cultural capital perspective, we have also demonstrated the role of social context in contributing to creating an extraordinary experience.

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Research that conceptualizes tourist extraordinary experiences both from the structural and anti-structural perspective is limited in the tourism literature. The purpose of this research is to develop a new theoretical perspective that re-conceptualizes our understanding of tourists’ extraordinary experience by taking into consideration both the structural and anti-structural elements of an experience. It draws on phenomenological interviews with 26 food tourists. The study finds that extraordinary experience consists of elements such as profaneness, collaborative interactions and conflict-easing, which represent both the structural and anti-structural elements. The findings of this study allow us to question whether extraordinary experience is purely structural or anti-structural as suggested by previous research. Rather, based on the findings, we argue that extraordinary experience is the positive co-existence of both the ordinary and the non-ordinary. As a result, we use the term “synstructure” to conceptualize the tourist extraordinary experience.

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