Design of a Gastronomic tourism experience in Bilbao

This paper focuses on designing experience of gastronomic tourism in Bilbao with the purpose of making tourists enjoy their trip through variety gastronomic resources. In the first part, we establish the conceptual framework by consulting work through the concepts of cultural tourism, gastronomic tourism, leisure experience and innovation of service. In the second part, beside the survey data of Basquetour, we interviewed the director of Bilbao Tourism, food producers and consulted documents and studies to analyse the internal and external environment of gastronomic tourism in Bilbao. Based on the data and the information collected, we make a series of diagnostic of SWOT about Planning and Management, Tourist Destination, Tourist Demand, and Products and Specials. Regarding to the strengths, we believe that Bilbao has many resources to develop gastronomic tourism not only because of her rich resources, but also the important place that the gastronomic culture occupies in the local customs; on the contrary to enhance the experience of this thematic tourism, there are many details need to be implement. In the third part we divide the gastronomic tourism in three stages: pretrip, in the trip and post-trip, and make innovative proposals to develop the experience in each stage. Each of these ideas that given in this part needs a concrete plan to make it realize and for the general management a rational system is required to integrate all the resources efficiently.