The presence of culinary tourism at World Travel Market in London has evolved somewhat since our last visit to the show in 2005. More destinations are including food in their marketing collateral while others have updated their brochures and information to keep up with the times.

Countries have chosen to handle their culinary tourism development and marketing in different ways, each way with its own benefits and drawbacks.

For example, China, Korea and Slovenia have full informative brochures on the foods of those countries.

In many other countries, it seems that culinary travel planning and promotion have largely moved from national to regional levels. Interestingly, major culinary destinations like Canada, Italy, Germany, South Africa, Switzerland and Sweden have left culinary marketing to the regions with the greatest number of culinary assets to offer.

Italy, for example, has so much to offer in culinary tourism that it would be nearly impossible to do justice to all the country's assets if the Italian national tourist office organized culinary tourism marketing on a national level.

Erik Wolf & Garry Taylor with representatives from Slovakian Wines

Countries like Armenia, Argentina and Peru have dedicated just a page in their main visitor brochures

Still other countries like Australia and New Zealand rely on their websites entirely to tell their culinary tourism stories. In fact, food and drink aren't mentioned at all in their printed collateral.

Large countries like Brazil and Germany, and important culinary tourism destinations like France and Portugal, have no apparent nationally organized culinary tourism strategy.

There seems to be an overall need by destinations to adopt a holistic approach of promoting niches: heritage, eco, culinary (and so on) all together. The value of all the tourism components looked at holisitcally is greater than each niche component individually.

Some destinations don't see the benefits of integrating cuisine as a stand-alone visitor attraction. I recall the representative of one small country with excellent but largely unknown wine production tell me "we don't see the need of separating out food and drink as attractions." The only thing I could think was "that's exactly why no one know about your wines."

Assuming food and drink will be be part of the tourism experience is to miss the point of culinary tourism, which focuses on what is unique and memorable. Visitors will travel for food as an attraction but need to know in advance that unique food and drink exist

Most of our World Travel Market appointments were made in advance of the show. European destinations were most interested in our activities, followed by Canadian provinces, Peru and Barbados. Israel and Lebanon were also keen on promoting their food. In Asia, Korea and China had very helpful brochures on their
cuisine. Singapore and Cambodia were more than gracious with their offers to
follow up with additional information we needed. Other Asian destinations
seemed to miss the point of marketing food and drink as visitor attractions.

The only downside to the show was that, just like popular wine country destinations that have exceeded their carrying capacity, so has London and the ExCeL center exceeded their carrying capacity to support a trade show of this size. Lines as long as 30 minutes to get on the train platforms coming or going prompted us for the first time to have to take the bus to the trade show venue. On the last day of the show a normally one hour commute from the hotel took an ennerving two hours. Needless to say we were late for meetings.

Either London needs to devote more trains, more staff and better organization to this event or an entirely new venue in another country that can manage crowds of this size needs to be found. Perhaps London should contact the folks at Disney who know a thing or two about moving and organizing masses of people. We also felt bad for the associations, hotels and technology vendors who have always been sequestered in the far corner of the one hall, seeing far fewer visitors than the destination stands.

All in all, a good show. Very tiring and hard to identify best matches for meetings in advance, the show could use some refinements to take it to the
next level.