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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role that food and beverage (F&B) sensory stimuli play in building non-food-themed touristic experiences, such as wellness tourism experiences.

This paper adopts an asynchronous netnographic approach supported by software (T-Lab, 2021). The study was conducted on a database consisting of 3,141 reviews in English, left by customers of 38 wellness facilities (Spa Retreats) spread across 5 continents.

The analysis reveals that F&B stimuli contribute significantly to the tourist's perception of the wellness experience in a two-fold manner: on the one hand, they support the wellness experience, and on the other, through specific proposals (e.g. wine, vegan, detox, etc.), they qualify and differentiate the wellness experience in a hedonic rather than eudaimonic way.

The present study contributes to managerial literature on the topic of gastronomic tourism and wellness tourism by providing, on an international scale, empirical evidence of (a) the importance and role of F&B touchpoints in hybrid gastronomic experiences; and (b) the presence of a variety of “wellness experiencescapes”.

This study is the first attempt to measure the role of F&B in tourists' perceptions of non-food-themed experiences. The research not only provides new data on the wellness experience through a cross-continental analysis but also offers useful theoretical and managerial insights for the design of wellness tourism experiences.

Despite a growing interest in accessible tourism, delivering high-quality tourism experiences to people with disabilities (PwD) remains a major challenge. Beyond a number of acknowledged barriers (e.g. cultural, architectural, relational), the main issue is the lack of coordination amongst the many actors participating in the co-creation of tourism experiences. This paper intends to advance available knowledge on this issue by conceptually suggesting a solution that draws on the concepts of the tourism experience and digital ecosystems.

This paper is developed as a conceptual contribution, drawing also on an illustrative example that considers a tourist with mobility disability as the focal actor.

The results indicate that a digital ecosystem could contribute to making tourism locations more accessible by enabling information sharing and coordination amongst all actors that co-create the tourism experiences. Moreover, the analysis underlines that tourism locations should be designed to be useable by all people, drawing on the principles of the universal design.

This paper describes a path to fostering accessible tourism, drawing on local authorities, particularly municipalities and universities. The suggested solution would benefit from future empirical analyses to assess its strengths and weaknesses.

By drawing on the concept of digital ecosystems, this paper is amongst the first studies to suggest a path to making tourism locations more accessible to all tourists (with or without disabilities) based on technology.