An Empirical Study of Agritourism Evolution and E-Commerce Adoption Challenges

Agritourism represents an important means of supporting the diversification of farm economy. In this sense, the offer of new services and the adoption of effective e-commerce websites by agritourist farms can play a significant role in improving farm revenue streams. The aim of this study is to improve our understanding of the way in which farms exploit agritourism opportunities. The study uses an original methodology to survey the extent of the agritourism phenomena in a selected region and to evaluate the B2C e-commerce web interfaces for a sample of agritourist farms. The article presents key findings of a survey of 176 agritourist farms carried out in Calabria, Italy. The main survey results highlight a slow rate of progress towards agritourism in the agribusiness sector together with sluggish adoption of e-commerce among the surveyed enterprises.