Rural tourism and development: Evolution in Scientific Literature and Trends

Abstract

This work represents a contribution by showing the state of the art of research on rural tourism and development, identifying trends and proposing future lines and topics of research. Rural tourism and its influence on the economic development of rural areas has been an important and dynamic area of research since 2004. For this purpose, a quantitative bibliometric analysis of the 892 documents related to this topic contained within the Web of Science Core Collection has been carried out. Results show that studies on rural tourism mainly focus on Spain, Romania, and China. However, the most prolific authors are from Portugal, China, the United Kingdom, and the United States. There is a notable lack of studies focused on countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, mainly due to political and religious factors. Rural tourism is also an important and emergent sector, particularly in countries like Romania and China.

Inferring customer heterogeneity for rural tourism: A latent class approach based on a best-worst choice modelling

“…Therefore, they are more sensitive to contributing to their economic development. In addition, traditional and cultural values can be interpreted as powerful means to create place branding and to differentiate specific places (Ruiz-Real et al 2020).…”

“…From a practical point of view, we argue that understanding market heterogeneity leads to better management and a more complete satisfaction of tourist demand. And over time, this can mean a more sustainable development of rural areas (Eusébio et al 2017;Ruiz-Real et al 2020). Results show different groups of rural tourists to which rural establishments can be oriented and move away from the great problem of the scarce differentiation of rural tourism in Spain.…”

“…Preference heterogeneity for rural tourism. Rural tourism is a source of economic development that boosts local initiatives while integrating appropriately into the regional economy (Ruiz-Real et al 2020). Better knowledge of the market, more professional management, and modern marketing methods can lead to a more specialised supply that increases added value (Lane and Kastenholz 2015).…”

Artificial Intelligence in Tourism: A Review and Bibliometrics Research

“…Bibliometric methods have been used in tourism, leisure and hospitality to assess the scientific production of the field. Furthermore, these were applied in context of different subfields such as smart tourism (Johnson & Samakovlis, 2019), gastronomy (Okumus et al, 2018), lodging industry (Köseoglu et al, 2018;Okumus et al, 2019), sustainable tourism (Ruhanen et al, 2015), rural tourism (Ruiz-Real et al, 2020), wine tourism (Sánchez et al, 2017), tourism's economic impact (Comerio & Strozzi, 2019), social media (Leung et al, 2017), peer to peer studies (Andreu et al, 2020;Núñez-Tabales et al, 2020), psychological research on tourism (Barrios et al, 2008), and competitiveness and innovation (Teixeira & Ferreira, 2018).…”

Preferences and Tourism Development under Uncertainty: An Empirical Study

“…The authors observe that people prefer to go to "happier" countries and prefer to spend more in happier countries since the impact of happiness on tourist arrivals and tourism spending is positive. Several previous papers have focused on the determinants of the sustainability of tourism development (see, e.g., [5][6][7][8][9]). (see the literature review of [9] for the effects of psychological indicators on tourism development).…”