Rural tourism and its contribution to the development of countryside

Abstract

The Czech Republic does not have any central registry of rural tourism facilities; there is no information about the availability and quality of services or about their economic results. The goal of this contribution is to describe the current state of rural tourism in the Czech Republic, and to find the bottlenecks, problems and potential risks. The lack of information about this sector was the motivation for a survey which produced a great deal of information about the situation in the rural tourism business in the Czech Republic. We apply one-dimensional and multiple-dimensional statistical analyses to data from the completed questionnaires. The multiple-dimensional analysis is based on dependency tests and calculations of the intensity of the dependency between variables in contingency tables.The description and findings arise from the quantification and analysis of the information from the questionnaire survey. We find that most firms in the sector are small (so called micro firms) and usually have no links to the agricultural production. The income from tourism frequently represents only a supplementary part of the businesses’ whole revenues and the profitability is to a certain extent dependent on the services offered and how they are promoted. In general, the subjects providing special offers such as horse riding, local foods, firm tourism, etc., are more successful.

Segmentation of rural tourists in the Czech Republic

“…• to determine tourists' profi les which incline towards certain type of rural tourism, • to describe the specifi c groups of rural tourists using factors from literature and from own inquiry survey, • to deduce some general recommendation to the rural tourism operators in CR. The investigation follows the inquiry survey focused on rural tourism providers (Dömeová and Jindrová, 2011;Jindrová et al, 2010).…”

Impacts of Agritourism Revenues on Farm Incomes in 2004–2020 – The V4 Experience

“…Very similar definitions are given by Hollas et al (2021);and Chase et al (2018). Agritourism has developed very successfully in many countries in Europe, Asia and the American continent (Kania and Bogusz, 2016;Roman and Grudzień, 2021;He et al, 2021;Dömeová and Jindrová, 2011;Radović, 2020), with increasing numbers of farms involved in this activity. In Italy the number of registered tourist farms increased by 60% from 2000 to 2015, in Austria 6% of all farms deal with agritourism, in the Alpine region of Germany 20% of farms offer agritourism services (Žibert et al, 2022).…”

“…Agritourism was also found to be profitable in specific regions of the V4 countries, empirical results exist for Poland (Roman and Grudzień, 2021;Kania and Bogusz, 2016;Roman, Roman and Prus, 2020), for Slovakia (Habán, Macák and Otepka, 2012;Mura and Kljucnikov, 2018), the Czech Republic (Dömeová and Jindrová, 2011;Škodová Parmová and Dvořák, 2009) and Hungary (Kovács, 2020;Szabó, 2005). However, these results are often based on particular areas, and analyse different economic indicators, in different years, therefore it is difficult to make a meaningful comparison between countries and farms.…”

“…The one core problem for the EU as a whole is the urban-rural divide, therefore considerable amounts of financial support have been spent on rural development, and agriculture-related subsidy programmes. Among them, farm diversification plays an important role, bringing additional incomes to rural areas, that do not depend on agricultural production (Šimková, 2014;Garrod, Wornell and Youell, 2006;McAreavey and McDonagh, 2011;van der Ploeg, 2000;Melichová and Majstríková, 2017;Dömeová and Jindrová, 2011).…”

Geographical Perspectives on Agritourism in The Czech Republic

“…Marketing and management, motivation for the involvement of farmers in this type of business, and their attitudes monitored at a national level, have received much more attention and consideration at this time (Nilsson, 2002;Sharpley, Vass, 2006;Haugen, Vik, 2008;Dömeova, Jindrova, 2011;Forbord et al, 2012).…”