Consumption Motivations, Savored Positive Emotions, and Savoring Processes in Recalling Travel Experiences of Food

Abstract

This study examines the motivation for tasting halal food among non-Muslim tourists during their recent trips away from home. It also integrates the positive psychology concept of savoring by examining the positive emotions savored by non-Muslim tourists on the basis of the broaden-and-build theory, including the savoring processes used when recalling their recent halal food experiences after returning from holiday. Data were collected from 220 non-Muslim tourists using a self-administered open-ended web-based questionnaire in Amazon MTurk. More than half of the non-Muslim respondents considered themselves to be food neophiliacs, and the two main motivations for consuming halal food were to experience something new and taste. The most common positive emotions savored by non-Muslim tourists when recalling their recent halal food experiences were joy and love. Taste, togetherness, and novelty were identified as the dominant factors that intensified respondents' savoring of their halal food experiences and can be linked to three out of four savoring processes: luxuriating, thanksgiving, and marveling.