Understanding coffee tourism development through the dynamic capabilities lens: a qualitative cross-national exploration

Abstract

This research contributes to a deeper empirical and conceptual understanding of coffee tourism development. By using a qualitative cross-national approach encompassing five coffee producing nations and guided by the dynamic capabilities framework, this study examines the potential, capitalisation and further consolidation of coffee tourism. The experiences of coffee firm leaders were gathered through semi-structured open-ended interviews; the qualitative analysis uncovered 12 overarching dimensions and helped craft a conceptual framework, with implications for understanding coffee tourism development from a practitioner and conceptual perspective. For instance, coffee tourism's potential is mainly explained by the visitor-centred and firm-centred dimensions, while the individual firm and upstream supply-chain capitalisation dimensions illuminate capitalisation demonstrations. The findings also exhibited relationships with the dynamic capabilities framework. Among these, educational experiences elucidate coffee tourism's potential (sensing) the capitalization of financial gains (seizing) while working alongside the government underlines further tourism development (reconfiguring). Various differences were also noted between countries and regions.