Enhancing Food Tour through Experience Design: A Case Study of a Pre-Launch Food Tour in Kaohsiung

Summary

Food tourism in Kaohsiung remains largely unstructured, with few English-friendly, guided walking tours available for international visitors. This case study presents how a memorable experience can be designed and developed within a food tour, using the pre-launch development and pilot-testing process of a structured Yancheng food tour as the basis for analysis, as narrated by the founder and CEO of the walking tour company. Following a pilot test with international participants that yielded high satisfaction ratings, the founder confronted a tension central to experience design: a well-executed service is not the same as a memorable experience. Applying the Experience Economy framework – which holds that experiences, unlike services, engage guests personally and leave a lasting memory through four realms (Entertainment, Education, Escapism, and Esthetics) – the case maps the tour against the four experiential realms and identifies a structural imbalance: strong Education and esthetics, Entertainment present but unstructured, an absent Escapism realm, and no deliberately engineered peak moment. Drawing further on the Peak-End Rule, the case proposes three targeted redesign interventions and offers practical lessons for tourism operators and students of experience design working in food tourism contexts.