1. Introduction
In the dynamic world today, more and more people want to travel to discover fabulous natural scenery and different culture in other areas. However, getting experiences form tasting food is now becoming a new incentive, and this incentive gave birth to a new kind of tourism-gastronomic tourism or culinaty tourism. Gastronomic tourism is the pursuit of travel in the quest for the enjoyment of prepared food, drinks and other related food activities (wolf 2002). A growing attention has been placed on this new trend that made a very attractive tourist product in many destinations. As for Vietnam, a country holding a great diversity of food can get considerable advantages in developing culinary tourism. Nevertheless, Vietnamese tourism industry has not exploited thoroughly this potential. The reason is that tourists just enjoy gastronomy as an additional part of their tour. Furthermore, the number of culinary tours in vietnam now is relatively limited. It is really a waste of resources, so we do this research aiming at developing a better understading of the role, development and future of gastronomy heritages. The study takes Vietnamese gastronomic tourism as the target object. The four main parts will be covered, which are the potential, current activities and trend, role of human resource, and some suggesstions for future development.
2. Discussion of findings 2.1 Potential of Vietnam’s gastronomy
Three days of “Thang Long cuisine in the south” festival attract 6,300 tourists, with a large number of foreigner (Toan, 2009). In this July, 40,000 tourists attend culinary festival in Vung Tau (Nhi, 2012). Above figures