Heritage preservation: is it a motivation for agritourism entrepreneurship?

Previous studies on agritourism entrepreneurship have identified a variety of economic and non-economic motivations driving farm operators to start the agritourism activity. Nonetheless, local heritage preservation and enhancement have been completely overlooked. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether heritage preservation and enhancement (in its three facets related to: tangible rural heritage; agrifood heritage; rural way of life heritage) is a specific non-economic motivation for agritourism entrepreneurship.Methodology. A survey on a sample of 226 Italian agritourism operators was conducted in March 2015. Data were first analysed through a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and then through the importance-performance analysis (IPA).Findings. The results show that there are 5 different groups of motivations to start the agritourism business, namely: i) economic motivations; ii) personal and family-related motivations; iii) tangible rural heritage preservation and enhancement; iv) agrifood heritage preservation and enhancement; v) rural way of life heritage preservation and enhancement. Hence heritage preservation and enhancement (in its three facets) has a pivotal role and it is more important than economic motivations. Similarly operators are more satisfied for having contributed to heritage preservation than for having obtained economic benefits from the agritourism activity.Research limits. Caution should be paid before extending these results to countries other than Italy (where, for example, agrifood heritage has a strong and peculiar tradition and connection with the territory).Practical implications. Operators are well aware of their contribution to the preservation and enhancement of local heritage but also perceive that tourists are not always able to appreciate the value of this contribution and have misconceptions about the essence of agritourism. This may be the result also of the use of the label agritourism to indicate offerings (such as agri-spas or basic accommodation services) which do not primarily focus on the link with local heritage. Therefore, it is important that authentic agritourism operators that focus on heritage (in its three facets) are able to share the efforts to make potential guests aware about the uniqueness of their offering, emphasizing the strong link with the local heritage.Originality of the study. This is the first study in the literature stream about agritourism entrepreneurship to demonstrate that locale heritage preservation and enhancement is a distinct, key motivation for agritourism operators.