This investigation reviewed articles associated with sustainable rural tourism found on the Web of Science database over a 10-year span from 2009 to 2019. The 76 articles that were selected for their inclusion of the concept of sustainable rural tourism were listed in a comprehensive table, thereby revealing the research purpose, topics, detailed topics, research methods, and data source of the articles. The findings indicate that many papers on sustainable rural tourism were written from a holistic sustainability perspective without being biased towards any one of the environmental, economic, and social aspects. In the field of rural tourism, it is essential to pay attention to interactions in all aspects of the environment, economy, and society, and to analyze them overall. In addition, this study confirmed that efforts to understand sustainable rural tourism from the customer perspective have been increased since customer loyalty is considered important for sustainability. This study is significant in that, since it evaluated the knowledge status for the first time through systematic review and applied content analysis to academic literature related to sustainability in the sector of rural tourism, it can expand and deepen the knowledge and understanding of related topics and raise awareness of a new research direction.
Aim of study: To explore rural tourists’ views in order to identify different market segmentation in relation to rural tourism experiences.Area of study: Spain.Material and methods: Visual Q, a personal subjectivity research methodology, was applied to present both visual and linguistic aspects so that tourists can more intuitively recognize and answer questions regarding their experiences. Thus, it enables researchers to explore rural tourism experiences from tourists’ subjective perceptions.Main results: There are three primary segments of tourist experiences in rural tourism: ‘Occasion driven visitor’, ‘Active leisure seeker’ and ‘Rural immersion pursuer’ and across all visitors, a common pursuit of ‘A pleasant break’.Research highlights: This paper suggests that rural tourism should offer a range of value propositions, thereby escaping the existing monotonous ones.
This research aims to analyse customers' preference heterogeneity for rural tourism in Spain and explore their preferences' personal and socio-demographic factors. To achieve this purpose, latent class analysis with the best-worst choice modelling has been applied through conducting a survey on 452 customers in Madrid and Barcelona. The results show that there are five classes in the Spanish rural tourism market: 'all-around seeker', 'leisure activist', 'culture explorer', 'comfort-driven user', and 'basic value pursuer'. The contribution of this investigation is that it is the first study that applied the latent class analysis with best-worst choice modelling to explore customers' preference heterogeneity for rural tourism.
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