Evaluation of Agritourism Activity in Italy: Facility Based or Local Culture Based?

Abstract

This paper identifies which diversified activities influence the price level of agritourism and how they do so. A hypothesis that contrasts two types of activity (facility based and local culture based) is examined. First, from a conceptual perspective, the authors note that agritourism based on local cultural resources can internalize positive externalities, which are uniquely nurtured local cultural resources, into income – unlike facility based activity that has no connection with local cultural resources. Second, the results of estimations from a price determinant ordered logit model demonstrate that owning a swimming pool is the most common and influential factor in enhancing the price level, while regional diversity is observed in local cultural resource based activities such as restaurants, World Heritage Sites and DOC wines. These findings indicate that hardware based evolution is more effective in the short term than evolution based on software. Nevertheless, this hardware based evolution of agritourism is founded implicitly on an assumption of continuously growing demand and sufficient financial capability for the fixed investment. When growth in demand becomes stagnant, facility installation can be a heavy burden on operators. Consequently, for the sustainable development of agritourism, it will be necessary to harness the locality so as to create a balance between facility based services and local culture based services.

An integrated demand and supply conceptual framework: Investigating agritourism services

“…Overall, the paper provides some homogenous findings with previous studies (Galluzzo, 2015;Ohe & Ciani, 2011;Santeramo, 2015) and, at the same time, offers an integrated demand-supply framework that can be implemented in other studies and in other economic sectors. As a limitation, the empirical data can be regarded as rather narrow.…”

On the demand for agritourism: a cursory review of methodologies and practice

“…Existing agritourism studies predominantly focus on the characteristics of the supply, either profiling the product offered (e.g., types of activities, seasonality) orexamining the entrepreneurial motivations and levels of satisfaction of their providers (Barbieri & Mahoney, 2009;McGehee& Kim, 2004;Ollenburg& Buckley, 2007;Tew& Barbieri, 2013).Although a growing number of studies on the demand for agritourism is gaining space in the international scientific platform (e.g., Carpioet al, 2008;Ohe & Ciani, 2011;, such information is scatter. The scant and disperse literature on agritourism demand, coupled with a steady growth in its supply andan increasing interest in promoting this alternative form of tourism (Gil Arroyo et al, 2013), calls for the integration of the existing information to shed light on future research directions.…”

A supply‐side analysis of agritourism: Evidence from farm‐level agriculture census data in Taiwan

“…One strand of literature addresses the demand of agritourism (Busby and Rendle ; Carpio et al . ; Ohe and Ciani ; Santeramo ; Santeramo and Barbieri ). These studies found that farms in rural areas were receptive of consumer demand for agritourism.…”

“…Agritourism has taken root in the United States (Khanal and Mishra ; Sotomayor et al . ), Italy (Ohe and Ciani ), the United Kingdom (Ilbery et al . ; Bernardo et al .…”