Tourists’ perception of landscape attributes in rural tourism

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to identify the perception of tourists towards positive and negative landscape features. Its objective is to classify rural tourists into homogenous groups according to their sensitivity towards specific landscape characteristics.

Design/methodology/approach

The work is based on quantitative data collection among tourists spending a vacation at agritourism farms. Altogether, 378 valid questionnaires were collected. A K-mean cluster analysis is conducted to group respondents into homogenous groups.

Findings

The research revealed that tourists particularly enjoy the presence of a landscape comprising orchards, flowery/grassy meadows and vineyards. In contrast, tourists find landscapes that reflects a neglected environment, views of factories and congested roads to be particularly unpleasant. This work has also identified the presence of three different clusters with distinct sensitivity towards landscape attributes: there are tourists who are highly sensitive to both positive and negative attributes, tourists who are highly sensitive to positive attributes but less sensitive to the negative attributes and tourists who are less sensitive to both the positive and the negative attributes.

Originality/value

When discussing issues related to the landscape, the question arises as to how and who should preserve and enhance the landscape for tourism reasons. The results of this research demonstrate that preserving and caring for the environment is imperative to the success of rural tourism.

Citation

Osti, L. and Cicero, L. (2018), "Tourists’ perception of landscape attributes in rural tourism", Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes, Vol. 10 No. 2, pp. 211-221. https://doi.org/10.1108/WHATT-12-2017-0087