Food festivals can offer a whole host of sensory experiences for visitors while engaging with a destination and its people. Understanding visitors' motivations to attend a specific food festival is beneficial for both community developers and festival professionals when implementing an effective marketing strategy in order to promote the event. This study applied a festival motivation framework incorporating three interacting components as the foundation to study food festival motives. The factor analysis results revealed six delineated motivational dimensions of visitors attending a regional food festival in Texas. Findings indicated patrons attended the food festival for generic leisure and travel needs, event-specific experiences, and extrinsic motives. Marketing implications are discussed along with the findings.

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Food festivals can offer a whole host of sensory experiences for visitors while engaging with a destination and its people. Understanding visitors' motivations to attend a specific food festival is beneficial for both community developers and festival professionals when implementing an effective marketing strategy in order to promote the event. This study applied a festival motivation framework incorporating three interacting components as the foundation to study food festival motives. The factor analysis results revealed six delineated motivational dimensions of visitors attending a regional food festival in Texas. Findings indicated patrons attended the food festival for generic leisure and travel needs, event-specific experiences, and extrinsic motives. Marketing implications are discussed along with the findings.

This study attempts to examine the relationships between online shopping values and intention in the purchase behavior of online travel products.It extends prior consumer-centered research by examining the association of perceived risk and the online shopping value with customer satisfaction to discover whether perceived risk moderates the relationship of intention with shopping values and customer satisfaction. Findings from this study reveal that matured consumers' satisfaction acts as an important mediator which partially mediating the relationship between shopping value and purchase intention. Interestingly, perceived risk is found to have no moderating effects on the relationship of shopping value and purchase intention. Practical implications are recommended at the end of this study.

As a result of exponential growth in the popularity of blogging, travel blogs have demonstrated their enormous marketing potential, and have become an increasingly important mechanism for exchanging information among tourists. The present study modeled online social support and perceived value as antecedents of the impacts of influential travel bloggers on their blog members’ travel-related behavioral intentions, and examined the mediating role of sense of virtual community (SOVC) among these relationships. The analysis results herein demonstrate that online social support, perceived value, and SOVC relate significantly to blog members’ behavior intention. Furthermore, the influence of perceived value and SOVC on behavior intention are both respectively significant. With SOVC as a mediating variable, the CI indirect effect of the perceived value on travel intention did not include 0, indicating an indirect relationship between these two variables. Referring to perceived values, the findings indicates that blog members perceive the influential travel blogs as offering epistemic value more than others. These findings have theoretical implications for social media and online interaction related literature, and have critical business implications for customer to customer (C2C) marketers to distinguish themselves within the expanding number of influential travel blogs.