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This article draws on the application of interpretive walks in a socio‐geographical study of tourism‐oriented entrepreneurial activity on multi‐generational family farms in New Zealand. We highlight the great potential this method holds for tourism researchers interested in the ways tourist spaces are produced in processes of place‐making. Mobile methods have been a feature of qualitative field research in several disciplines for some time, particularly in cultural geography with its emphasis on human interactions in and with landscapes. The interpretive walk, known also as the walking interview, has been applied mainly in urban neighbourhood, health, transport, and housing research, where it has proven very useful for revealing human connections to place that have been difficult to elicit using stationary face‐to‐face interviews. This article is one of the few that reports on the use of the method in a farm tourism setting. It is also one of few applied studies seeking to understand the local geographies of farm tourism and their connections to the farm site as both family home and place of primary production. The method is characterised as an effective tool for navigating and interpreting the socio‐spatial settings in which new rural tourism ventures emerge, evolve, and are embedded. The approach allows for unexpected encounters with spatial practices and strategies, projects, and objects, behind which lie stories of changing human relationships with the land, economy, and community, and of the exigencies of everyday life that are less readily unearthed using conventional interviews.

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The role of accommodation-sharing platforms, such as Airbnb, is seen as a disruption to more conventional accommodation providers and rental markets in many cities and regions worldwide. This Regional Graphic focuses on New Zealand, showing a snapshot in time of the spatial distribution of the accommodation provided by Airbnb. What the map shows are patterns of statistically significant mildly positive clustering (Moran's I = 0.33, p ≤ 0.05) of the Airbnb locations. The 'traditional' tourism hotspots, mainly in the South Island of New Zealand, for example, Wanaka or Queenstown (Queenstown Hill, Lake Hayes South, Sunshine Bay), and the largest city, Auckland (Central West, East, Habourside and Waiheke Island), are shown. A few of the highest ranked places also feature a high intensity per usually resident person. For example, Queenstown Hill has 204 Airbnb listings per 1000 residents. The area with the highest number of Airbnbs is Wanaka, a smaller South Island tourist destination. A key issue for future research is how short-term rentals pose a challenge to local authorities who collect property taxes based on the value of the property, with some local authorities (e.g., Auckland) proposing or enacting specific by-laws in relation to Airbnb.

This paper reports findings from a study of the adaptive re-purposing of farm buildings for a wide array of agritourism activities. The research is being conducted in New Zealand where the international visitor sector is thriving. In response, an increasing number of farmers are attempting to boost their farm incomes by adding tourism ventures to their business portfolios. In doing so, many of them are using and preserving rural cultural heritage, particularly old agricultural and other rural buildings, while also diversifying farm activity. This element of agritourism therefore has an important role in the protection and adaptive re-use of farm buildings, farm landscape change, and the creation of new value and values in the countryside. In the cases we have studied, this entrepreneurial activity is largely farmer-driven and undertaken with some, but limited, financial support from central and local government. In considering the policy implications of our work, we call for the provision of advisory services to facilitate and enable New Zealand farmers to create profitable and sustainable high-quality tourism services that simultaneously preserve farm buildings.