Food heritage - a key factor for positioning Slavonia as a lifestyle destination

Global tourism market has seen a significant interest growth for authentic and new experiences connected to the local culture and the way of life at the destinations that the tourists visit. Local gastronomy and authentic and recognizable cuisine can be excellent connectors with other parts of tourist offer that make the destination recognizable, i.e. they can present a means for market positioning and raising the competitive advantages of the destination. One of the more important challenges of the experience economy, a new economic paradigm in the sector of tourism, is finding a means of using the intangible heritage, culture of living and working where the culture of food production and the whole experience connected to food play a significant role as well as using this heritage as a ground for designing original and competitive tourist experiences. The aim of this paper is to present the possibilities of positioning Slavonia as a recognizable gourmet destination in the Croatian tourist market. The work is based on the growth of tourist s interests for gastronomy and other tourist experiences connected to it, an important impulse for visiting the Croatian tourist destination, which was also indicated by the recent TOMAS summer 2017 research. The region of Slavonia has an extremely rich tourist attraction base connected to gastronomy and other intangible heritage connected to it. It presents a strong but still insufficiently exploited means of the region s branding and its positioning as a lifestyle destination of the perennial tourism. A research among the county tourist boards in Slavonia was conducted for the purpose of this work. The goal of the research was to examine the manner of using gastronomy and other tourist experiences connected to it as a motive for branding and positioning the tourist offer. Moreover, the authors have conducted a survey among the owners and managers of ten restaurants in the mentioned area in order to examine the extent of representing the local gastronomy in their offer, to examine the extent of using parts of experience economy to create authentic experiences among their tourists, as well as to examine the connections of the mentioned restaurants to other stakeholders in the area in order to create a recognizable integral gastronomic tourist experience.