Collecting Sociodemographic Data to Promote Agrotourism

09 Collecting Sociodemographic Data to Promote Agrotourism

1. Introduction

Without any doubt, agrotourism emerges due to changes in the preferences of tourists, who seem to search more and more for genuine experiences connected to nature. This preference trend has been increasing, especially in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, at an academic level, we still do not have an accurate enough definition of the predominant profile of agrotourism consumers and their socio-demographic profile. According to marketing principles, in order to better respond to your clients´ needs and adapt to changes, it is a must for the agrotourism sector to better define its target group. The aim of this guideline is to help agrotourism businesses to better know their clients´ sociodemographic reality in order to adapt their offer to clients´ needs and desires.

2. Key Elements

2.1 General Trends – What Is the Average Tourist Seeking?

According to Andalucía Lab data, the most popular agrotourism activities are those related to farms with animals where tasks such as cow milking, pig feeding, or egg collection can be carried out. Also, there is a generalized trend regarding food production activities for those who practice this type of tourism.

Agrotourism lovers also search for options where there is a sport offered to take place in nature such as horse riding, rafting, canoeing, or scuba diving.

There are three types of agrotourism that have become particularly popular in recent years:

Wine tourism
Olive oil tourism
Beer tasting

2.2 Knowing My visitors – Profile Information

Apart from adapting to general trends, you can create your own average visitor profile to better match the needs of those who are most likely to visit you. What information is interesting to me?

General	Specific
Demographic: gender, age, nationality, region Personality traits Values/lifestyle	Perceptions Expectations Preferences Attitudes

General

Specific

Demographic: gender, age, nationality, region

Personality traits

Values/lifestyle

Perceptions

Expectations

Preferences

Attitudes

Source: own elaboration based on (Paül et Araújo, 2015)

How can you do this? Ask your guests!

General data – check-in: you can use the booking information to profile your customer type. At check-in, you can ask for some basic information such as gender, age and origin.
Having this information can help you to include customised activities, for example, if you notice that you receive a great number of families, you can plan kid-friendly activities to enjoy in family, kindergarten services, or even adapt the size of your beds!
The place of origin is also important to maybe start promoting your business in those regions (local events, fairs, regional online portals…). Also, this is helpful to know how to communicate and promote your business, to do it in a culturally adapted way. For example, if it comes that you start receiving lots of Chinese visitors you can consider translating your webpage to Chinese and study why your business is popular in a particular place.
Previous knowledge about your specific activity: what do my guests know about my business? This information is helpful to better address their information need to plan activities. Let´s say you are a cow farmer offering cow milking experiences. It is not the same to address an expert as someone that has barely seen a cow before, and you can plan the same activity but aim at two different types of visitors, an experienced one, who might enjoy a more technical/scientific experience, and another one who would enjoy a full introduction to the topic.
Activities evaluation: to have a real evaluation of your activities can help you to improve your offer. Here are some questions you can ask regarding the activity offer and development to evaluate your guests´ satisfaction. These are general, but you can include some other specifics related to your activity offer. The idea is that guests evaluate several parameters using a 1-5 scale, where 1 is the lower rating and 5 is the highest.

Question	Evaluation (1-5)
The number of activities is adequate
Activities are interesting
Explanations have been interesting and useful
I enjoyed meeting the farmer
Activities lasted the right amount of time
I enjoyed the rhythm of the activities
The number of participants is correct
Staff attention is good

Source: own elaboration based on (Paül et Araújo, 2015)

3. Example

Parc Agrari del Baix de Llobregat example

Parc Agrari del Baix Llobregat is an example of a strategy build on a strong base of real data from customers, collected using the tables above included. You can go check their website and see how the implementation of this information to your strategy can look like.

4. Benefits and Potential Impact

The benefits and impact you might have from the guideline implementation are:

For the mentor	For the mentee
A demonstration of how to use the booking information	Get to know the importance of collecting data from your guests to adapt your business to their needs
Advantages of using average visitor profile	Tips and information sources

5. Self-evaluation Questionnaire

The Farms’ Charm project aims to develop learning materials to educate small and medium-sized farmers in possible ways of starting their agritourism activities which will help them not only diversify their incomes but also promote their farm products directly to consumers. All that while reviving the rural areas and local communities and promoting a sustainable way of tourism which is in line with the tendencies of slowing down and staying longer at one area.

Contact Info

info@farmscharm.com

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. The content of this website reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

Project number: 2022-1-CZ01-KA220-ADU-000089506

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