Purpose This study aims to define the concept of slow tourism, describe tourists’ slow food experiences and examine the relationship between the tourists’ slow food experience and their quality of life (QOL). Design/methodology/approach An online survey distributed through the Amazon MTurk platform yields 453 valid questionnaires. Confirmatory factor analysis and structure equational modeling are used to analyze the data. Findings The results reveal that authenticity and slowness significantly affect tourists’ slow food experience, while environmental consciousness does not influence tourists’ slow food experiences. Further, the slow food experience elicits a positive impact on the tourists’ QOL. Originality/value This study contributes to delineating the scope of slow food experiences, which remains unexplored in previous studies and gives further insight into how they impact life quality. This paper expands the body of knowledge by establishing three factors influencing slow food experiences and further provides valuable advice for tourism marketers at slow destinations.

Tourism impacts the quality of life of host community residents in myriad ways. Most research seeking to understand those impacts has either focused on tourism in general or a single specific type of tourism. Little is understood about how residents attribute perceived impacts to different forms of tourism when they are present in the same community. We surveyed 995 residents of the island of São Miguel in the Azores archipelago to examine perceptions of tourism's quality of life impacts using Andereck and Nyaupane's Tourism Quality of Life Impacts scale in relation to tourism in general, cruise tourism, and Airbnb tourism. While confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) revealed poor fit of the measurement model across all forms of tourism, repeated measures ANOVA analysis of individual impact questions revealed that residents did differentiate between the impacts of various types of tourism in their community. Residents thought that tourism in general was the most detrimental to urban issues like traffic and crowding and that cruise tourism provided the least positive impacts to their community across all other TQOL variables. These findings indicate that future research on resident perceptions of tourism impacts should seek to measure impacts related to the specific forms of tourism.

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