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How to Qualify Your Structure

18

How to Qualify Your Structure

1. Introduction

This guideline is aimed at raising the quality of agrotourism services offered by local entrepreneurs and making rural areas welcoming places.

Aimed at all those key players in the agricultural and rural tourism sector, the guide is designed to improve the skills needed to create, individually and as part of a network, a quality welcome capable of favouring the activation of new sustainable tourist flows and responding to the growing demand for unique and engaging experiences by travellers, respecting the territory and valuing products.

2. Key Elements

2.1 Welcome and Hospitality

The word agritourism alone is capable of arousing profound emotions in each of us, evoking contact with the land. The combination of agriculture and tourism fascinates and brings to mind original needs, attachment to the land and a desire for harmony and relaxation that today, in today’s hectic city life, are difficult to satisfy.

People are increasingly looking for stays or holidays that offer direct contact with nature, which has unfortunately been somewhat lost, and above all allow for special experiences. In addition, there are more and more lovers of good food, seeking traditional foods and the flavours of yesteryear, linked to the warmth of family.

The choice of opening an agritourism and offering an original, familiar and natural form of hospitality can really prove to be a winning one and very profitable, today more than ever.

Previously of interest to a small circle of enthusiasts of traditions and food and wine specialities, today it involves broad strata of the population, motivated by contact with nature, good food, tranquillity and generally low prices.

2.2 Food Provision

Whoever carries out agritourism activities must be an agricultural entrepreneur considering the connection of agritourism with rural tourism, and the different denomination of the activity live agritourism, farm tourism, farm-based tourism 

In order to guarantee a high level of quality the agritourism can provide:

  • accommodation in lodgings or open spaces intended for campers; 
  • provide meals and beverages, consisting mainly of their own products and those of farms in the area, with preference given to typical products and characterised by the DOP, IGP, IGT, DOC and DOCG marks or included in the national list of traditional agri-food products;
  • organise tastings of farm produce, including wine-tasting; organise, also outside the farm property, depending on the availability of the business, recreational and refreshment activities (picnics, etc.), also by means of agreements with local authorities, aimed at enhancing the territory and rural heritage.

2.3 Environmental protection and Sustainability

The main characteristics of environmentally sustainable agritourisms are as follows:

  • low energy consumption. To this end, the choice of the accommodation’s orientation is also important, with a south-facing position being preferred;
  • use of LED bulbs that can consume up to 80% less energy than traditional incandescent bulbs;
  • low water consumption thanks to the use of rational irrigation techniques for the land surrounding the accommodation facility;
  • staff sensitive to environmental issues. 
  • consumption of 0 km and genuine products, as they come from the local area, with preference given to organic ones. To meet this great challenge, many accommodation facilities have equipped themselves with their own gardens or orchards where raw materials are cultivated. 
  • distribution in guests’ rooms of kits of towels and sheets made from organic and natural materials;
  • use of ecological soaps and detergents;
  • encouragement of eco-sustainable tourism by providing guests with bicycles to travel the area’s itineraries without the use of a car;
  • use of natural and recycled materials for the accommodation facility’s interior furnishings and preference given to paints with natural and non-chemical pigments.

It is precisely this last point that allows us to introduce the subject of so-called bio-architecture, which consists in the use of furniture and carpets not coated with synthetic glues, such as formaldehyde, which are highly harmful to human health. It is therefore preferable to use wood for furniture and floor coverings, a material that among other things has a thermal-insulating function

2.4 Rewards

There are two different categories of quality labels for agritourisms: a first one referring to the quality of receptivity service and another one concerning the quality of foodstuffs. Such double characteristic seems not to be properly taken into account in current quality brands. In other words, there is a gap to be covered in order to agritourisms be perceived by users for its whole quality services.

According to the current researchers, it seems that there is room for designing an advanced brand for agritourism. For such a new environmental excellence label, one needs to change the current approach to the evaluation of the tourism offer, shifting toward an integrated vision that encounters:

  1. An integrated approach related to the whole offer of agritourism, that is services + foodstuffs;
  2. An integrated approach also related to what agritourism is composed by, that is tourist facility + working farm.

In other words, point 1 refers to the services that guests are provided with, while point 2 refers to the components of the agritourism system that generate such services. More specifically, point 1 signal that the new quality scheme should assess not only the performances of the accommodation service but also the foodstuff quality of products coming from the agritourism itself and provided to guests. This means taking contemporary into account the foodstuff quality of products, the environmental quality of the services and the environmental quality of the food chain.

Below a list of usefull EUROPEAN REFERENCES for certifying the quality of your structure 

Quality Labels For Agritourisms

Quality brand for agritourism in Europe 

Characteristics of some relevant quality brand for food sector

  • PDO – Protected Designation of Origin
  • PGI – Protected Geographical Indication
  • DOC – Controlled Designation of Origin

3. Example

Agrileisuretime – Didactical Farm

The farm is family-run and consists of 14 hectares of agricultural land nestled in the green Umbrian hills of vineyards, olive groves, arable land, pastures and woods. Everyone on the farm personally cares for what they produce and takes care to do so with deep respect for nature and human health.

The rediscovery that ‘nothing goes to waste’ in farming culture has led to the restoration of some crops. That of maize, for example, where the seed was used as food for animals, and as flour for humans, the cob as heat in fireplaces, and now in our multi-fuel boilers, and the leaves to weave baskets. 

Waste recycling used to be minimal, there were no plastic bags, and leftover food found exceptional means of disposal in pigs. Pig shelters are being set up on the farm. 

Respect for the environment and nature has led them to build a phyto-purification plant for waste water on the farm, so as to be able to recover some of it for irrigation; rainwater has been collected in a recovery pond to cope with the area’s water shortage. 

To save energy, a photovoltaic system and a mini-wind power plant are being built to produce hot water using solar panels. Not wasting and wasting, respecting nature, are the main teachings of the old men of these lands. 

In addition to farmyard animals (chickens guinea fowl turkeys ducks and rabbits), they have 7 beautiful horses that live free in their paddock paradise, 12 Suffolk sheep, Totò and Lilli, 2 border collies that move the flock.

In the tourist reception business, the family and all the staff pay special attention to respecting the environment by observing a few simple habits, such as using organic and natural cleaning products, using recycled furniture to furnish the rooms, printing on recycled paper where necessary (promos, menus, etc). On arrival, guests are given a set of rules to help them respect nature and the animals living on the farm, and to enjoy the experience 100%.

4. Benefits and Potential Impact

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

For the mentor For the mentee
  • To be able to easily identify rural tourism enterprises that offer a quality welcome and are active in environmental protection.
  • To be able to acquire quality.
  • To have easy access to useful information to make an enterprise qualifiable
  • To give value to a dish, to a service, to the genuine and sincere welcome offered to its guests.
  • Read about tourism and sustainability, talk about their own experiences and learn about those of others.
  • To have at their disposal tools for lasting and sustainable quality promotion
  • To be able to easily identify rural tourism enterprises that offer a quality welcome and are active in environmental protection.
  • To promote one’s territory by making its tourist resources known.

5. Self-evaluation Questionnaire