The ROI of Culinary Content in Destination Marketing

Tourism boards have gotten comfortable with the idea that food matters to a destination's brand. Fewer have made the jump to treating culinary content as a budget line with a real return, the same way they'd think about a hero video or a paid media placement. The spending data actually makes a pretty direct case for it.

Food Travelers Spend More, on More Than Just Food

Travelers motivated by food and drink put roughly 25 to 40% of their total trip budget toward food and beverage experiences, well above what a typical leisure traveler spends in that category. And 82% of travelers report spending more on food and drink while traveling than they do at home. That's a visitor who arrives already prepared to spend more, on the condition that the destination gives them a reason to believe the food is worth seeking out.

That reason is almost always visual before it's anything else. A traveler deciding between two similar destinations, or between skipping a meal out and booking a table somewhere specific, is very often making that call based on a photo they saw first, whether it came from the destination's own marketing or an influencer's feed.

The Market Is Growing Faster Than General Tourism

Culinary tourism has moved well past being a niche add-on to travel marketing, into one of the fastest-growing categories inside it. Recent industry estimates put the global culinary tourism market at roughly $1.25 trillion, with growth projected well above general tourism spending in the years ahead. A DMO that treats food content as an afterthought is leaving budget on the table in a category that's expanding faster than the industry it sits inside.

Skift Research's State of Travel 2026 report puts a number on why food content carries so much weight. Across the activities travelers spend on, food and culinary experiences rank first at 71%, ahead of adventure and nature at 48% and arts, culture, and history at 42%. The report also found the booking flow has flipped: travelers now research experiences before they even pick a destination, not after. For a DMO, that means culinary content isn't just supporting the decision to visit, it's often what starts it.

What "ROI" Actually Looks Like for a DMO

For a destination marketing organization, the return on culinary content rarely shows up as a single trackable purchase the way it might for a restaurant. It shows up as longer average stays, higher food-and-beverage spend once visitors arrive, and a stronger case for repeat visits built around a specific culinary calendar: a harvest season, a food festival, a restaurant week. Content built around those moments gives a destination something to market on a yearly cycle instead of a one-time campaign, which is where the spend actually compounds.

It also gives a DMO's own partners, individual restaurants, hotels, farms, and producers, a reason to amplify the destination's marketing as their own. A strong photo of a regional dish or a working vineyard does double duty: it markets the destination and gives the business behind it something worth sharing. I go through what belongs in that kind of shared library in the asset library every tourism board and wine region should be building.

Building the Budget Case

The strongest internal pitch for a culinary content budget usually isn't "food photos perform well on social," even though they do. It's connecting the specific spending behavior of a food traveler, the higher share of budget, the willingness to spend more than at home, to the destination's own visitor spend data. Once a board sees that its highest-value visitor segment is already primed to spend more on food, funding the content that reaches them stops being a nice-to-have and starts looking like the more obvious use of a media budget than a lot of what's already being funded. More on how this shift is playing out broadly in how culinary tourism is reshaping destination marketing, and on how a shoot like this actually runs in inside a hotel and tourism photography shoot.

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