Food and Wine Tourism as a Pull Factor for Tuscany

The aim of this paper is to underline the importance of the experience based tourism with reference to food and wine tourism in Tuscany. Starting from a literature review that has been focusing on a wide range of topics for long time, we explain first the different forms of tourism of taste; secondly the wide diffusion of this kind of tourism in Tuscany thanks to its important assets, as key factors to the tourist success; finally how the lack of upgraded tourist products and a standard communication are restraining its further improvement. The experience based tourism with its peculiar customization of the supply and the communication especially built for the new technological devices could upgrade the Tuscan tourist features. Just to give some examples, the more current tools include gamification and geocatching as new and amusing outputs that can involve the active tourist in search of new experiences, as well as the Sentiment Analysis as a process able to transform the customer opinions into useful data for a market segmentation and implementation of branding reputation.