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

ABSTRACT

During the last decades agritourism has expanded tremendously worldwide given visitors’ increased interest to appreciate the life in the countryside and farmers’ need to enhance their revenues from different economic activities. Despite such enlarged agritourism development, scant information is available on the state of its demand at both national and international levels. Given such a need, we cursorily reviewed the range of econometric methods employed to evaluate the demand of agritourism, summarizing the salient findings in their application. Our assessment shows that current studies provide a limited characterization of the agritourism demand, especially in terms of methods utilized and information compiled. We suggest that a broader set of economic approaches are needed to control for existing bias and model flaws, and to isolate the features and amenities pulling visitors to agritourism destinations. We also suggest expanding economic studies to fully capture the impact of increased agritourism demand in surrounding communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Agritourism
• demand
• stated preference
• revealed preference
• tourism flow