Rural stay: a new type of rural tourism in China

ABSTRACT

Rural stay, referring to urban dwellers staying in rural areas temporarily, with tourism activities as a supplement, is an emerging form of urban-rural mobility in China. Through exploring the visitors’ motives and resulting activities, this study aims to reveal the uniqueness of rural stay in China that has received little attention currently. Using a mixed methodology, empirical results show that rural stay intersects with various mobilities in terms of some common characteristics and motivations. Its uniqueness, however, is closely related to the China-specific macroeconomic context and embedded social and cultural values. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Rural tourism
• rural stay
• second home
• senior tourism
• migration
• motivation
• rural vitalization
• tourism marketing
• China
• Asia Pacific

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the efforts of two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on this paper and thank to the editors for their meticulous work. The assistance of Binrui Jiang in the survey is appreciated. We are also indebted to Honglei Zhang and Lin Lu whose suggestions contributed to the revision of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental Material

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Notes

1. The concept is from the “Evaluation Criteria for the Agency of the Convenient Living in Retirement Service” formulated by the China National Committee on Ageing in 2015, which is mainly applicable to the nursing institution model.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant number [41271172] and the Art and Social Science Foundation of Anhui Department of Education under Grant number [SK2019A0300].