Telling the story of a sustainable business model in Arctic luxury food tourism

Abstract

Luxury gastronomy can be relevant to tourism in terms of sustainability. This study adopted the perspective of business models (BMs) as narratives to explore luxury gastronomy and sustainability in the case of a food project in Arctic Norway. This study focused on the story that drives, communicates and legitimises the project’s BM and its sustainability. The main findings suggest that the specific BM can be viewed as a story revolving around two interrelated major themes: sustainability as an integrated part of quality and luxury as time for inspiration and self-care and as coherence (in experiential terms as well as in relation to sustainability commitment). The adoption of the perspective of BMs as narratives helped uncover the social dynamic dimension of the BM, which concerns the process through which businesses emerge from social interactions and, in the investigated case, is essentially an expression of a collective effort to include an element of innovativeness within a context that is otherwise rather static.