Social media and culinary heritage travel in the digital age: scale development and validation

Purpose Culinary heritage represents an important dimension of heritage and gastronomy tourism, with social media functioning as a major source of information shaping travellers’ perceptions and decisions. This underscores the need for a conceptualised and validated instrument to assess its influence on travellers’ destination choices. Accordingly, this study aims to develop and validate a measurement scale to examine the influence of social media on travel decision-making in culinary heritage contexts. Design/methodology/approach A sequential exploratory design was used, combining qualitative and quantitative methods to ensure theoretical and empirical rigour. The scale development process involved item generation, expert validation and empirical testing, using confirmatory factor analysis. The final framework comprises nine key construct domains. Findings This study identified and validated nine domains of constructs. The “Social Media and Culinary Heritage Travel (SoCHT) scale” demonstrates strong psychometric properties, providing a comprehensive framework to understand how social media shapes travellers’ culinary heritage experiences. Originality/value This study addresses a research gap by developing and validating a scale to capture the influence of social media on culinary heritage travel decisions. It offers a robust theoretical foundation integrating cultural identity, digital engagement and destination framing. The findings provide valuable insights for researchers and practitioners to inform strategic tourism planning and sustainable promotion of culinary heritage.