Contents
- What happens when the village is corrected to match the picture?
- Why do the villages near a big attraction keep their guests?
- What exactly is the visitor coming for?
- Who answers the phone when a booking comes in?
- Can a few guests a year replace the harvest?
- The restoration is the easy part
- Whose meadow is the car parked on?
Ask around in our business and you will often hear that rural tourism means selling a picture: the stone house with wooden shutters, a long breakfast under a walnut tree, a few chickens in the yard and someone rolling out dough in the background. Get the picture right, the thinking goes, and visitors will come.
I understand the appeal, and I have seen many project files built on exactly that image. Rural tourism, though, is travel to the countryside because of the countryside itself, and the villages that have welcomed visitors for years are not the ones that matched the picture best. They are the ones that understood what the picture leaves out.
UN Tourism’s own definition ties the visitor’s experience to nature, agriculture, rural lifestyle and culture, in places with few people and land given over to farming and forestry. In plain words, that countryside means villages, highlands, farmland, forest edges, places where people still live from the land and the day moves at another speed. Guests come to sleep in a village house, eat what grows nearby, walk, join a harvest, watch cheese being made or just be somewhere quiet. It covers a huge range, from mountain hamlets in the Alps and the Pyrenees and olive villages around the Mediterranean to rice terrace villages in Southeast Asia and working farm stays in New Zealand.
What happens when the village is corrected to match the picture?
In the picture, the village is silent. In reality a tractor starts before sunrise, a neighbor’s wedding goes on late into Saturday night and the dogs bark at every passing car. In the picture everything is clean. In reality there is mud after the rain, flies in August and the smell of animals, because animals live there. In the picture the house is authentic. In reality the toilet used to stand across the courtyard, the heating is a wood stove and the phone signal depends on which corner of the garden you stand in.
The tractor, the mud and the stove are not defects. They are the village itself.
Trouble starts when a project tries to correct all of it. The house is restored beautifully, the bathroom moves inside, the garden is redesigned, Wi-Fi arrives, and the result is a small boutique hotel that happens to stand among farmhouses. It could have been built anywhere. The guest who came for the village finds a version of the city with better air and wonders why the drive took so long.
Some of you will say, quite fairly, that nobody wants a February night next to a stove that goes out at three in the morning. Comfort is partly respect for the guest: a clean bathroom, hot water, a bed that does not sag. The line I would draw runs between making the village comfortable and turning it into something else, because the first protects what drew guests up the hill and the second quietly erases it.
Why do the villages near a big attraction keep their guests?
Look at the rural places that receive visitors year after year, almost anywhere, and one shared feature appears, one that rarely makes it into project documents. They sit close to something bigger.
The hill villages of Tuscany fill with people already staying in Florence or Siena. The villages of Cappadocia are part of a region with balloons, tour buses and thousands of hotel beds. Mountain hamlets that fill in summer are mostly on roads that touring coaches already travel, and the weekend crowds in villages an hour from a capital come largely from that capital, close enough for a day. Thermal hotels do similar work in a quieter way, since guests who came for wellness tourism have long afternoons to fill and are glad of a village lunch nearby.
What this tells me is that most visitors do not set off for a village only for the village. They come to a region for some other reason, a resort, a city, a day of cultural tourism at a famous site, a family visit, and the village becomes the half day or the long lunch that makes the trip memorable. A village two hours from anything, however lovely, struggles to fill its rooms whatever support it receives.
That may sound unromantic. I actually find it encouraging, since it means a village does not have to become a destination by itself. It has to become a very good stop on somebody else’s route, which is a far more realistic ambition.
What exactly is the visitor coming for?
“Village life” is a beautiful phrase and almost impossible to sell. Nobody can put it in a program, give it a date or tell a friend what they actually did.
A product works differently. Joining the olive harvest in November is a product. A morning at a family dairy where you watch the cheese being made and leave with a wheel of it under your arm is a product. So is a marked walking route that ends at a family kitchen, a mushroom season in the forest, a highland festival on a known weekend, a weaving workshop in a house where carpets are still made on the loom. Each one gives the visitor a reason, a date and a story to take home. The date matters more than people think, because a harvest morning cannot be sold in a month when the crop is already in the barn, and a village that honestly offers the pressing, the drying or the winter kitchen instead keeps far more goodwill than one whose booking page still shows the summer photographs in December.
This is also what makes a village usable for people in our business, who sort guests by the types of tourism that brought them and need something concrete to offer each. A DMC preparing a program for an incentive group on the coast can write “half a day in an olive village, with lunch at a family table” into a proposal. A hotel concierge in a coastal district can send guests up the hill on the day of the weekly village market. Neither of them can book “authentic rural life”, because there is nothing there to book.
The villages that grasp this stop describing themselves and start describing what a visitor will do between arriving and leaving.
Who answers the phone when a booking comes in?
Many rural tourism projects rest on a hopeful idea: villagers will become tourism entrepreneurs, running guesthouses, taking reservations, answering emails, managing their presence online and hosting guests from all over the world.
In the places that actually work, the arrangement usually looks different. Quite often someone from the city bought an old house, restored it, opened a guesthouse and did the marketing for years, and the villagers joined later as cooks, suppliers, guides, people who open their gardens or sell their honey and cheese. It does not sit comfortably with the language of project files, but it matches what actually happens.
This is not about underestimating villagers. They already have a full time job, and it is called farming. Answering a booking request in English late at night is another profession entirely. There is a quieter issue too. Hosting a guest is something village families in most cultures know and value deeply; hosting a customer every week, with expectations and online reviews, is something else, and many families who try it find the second tiring enough that, after a while, they stop wanting either.
So the question I would put to any rural plan is not whether villagers have been trained, but who carries the commercial side. A cooperative, a small local company, a guesthouse owner who moved in from outside, a regional agency or, where one exists, a destination management organization can all do it, as long as someone’s real job is filling the rooms and keeping the standard. When I look at a rural program put together by an agency, I want plain answers to a handful of questions before anything else:
- Which family or business receives which part of the price, and for what work?
- Who takes the booking, and who tells the host who is arriving tomorrow and how many?
- What happens to the food already bought and the day already kept free when a group cancels?
- Is the guide paid separately from the kitchen or the workshop, or is one fee quietly covering both?
A bundled price that hides who carries the work and the risk is how hosts get tired of tourism, and it is a much commoner reason for a village to drop out than bad weather or a poor season. UN Tourism’s Best Tourism Villages program, for what it is worth, looks at governance, partnerships with the community and value chain integration next to the cultural and natural assets, which is the right instinct: the pretty lane is only one line of the assessment.
Can a few guests a year replace the harvest?
Another hopeful idea is that tourism will take over from farming as the village’s main income, while the places that last treat it as an addition.
The arithmetic is not complicated. A family hosting a handful of guests a year earns far less than a season of crops or animals brings in, while the work of preparing rooms, cooking and staying available never quite stops. Arrivals are irregular, with three bookings in one week and then silence for two months. Food bought for guests who cancel stays in the kitchen. And a family that has moved its whole livelihood into tourism feels the first bad season very hard.
Where farming continues, tourism can make it stronger rather than push it aside. The guest who spent a morning at the dairy goes home and orders cheese by courier all winter. The family that fed a walking group sells its honey to the guesthouse down the road every summer. Every winter, village cheese, oil and honey travel to city kitchens in parcels, and that second channel is often worth more than the guest nights.
The restoration is the easy part
Most rural tourism projects are planned up to the opening: restoration, training, signage, a launch with photographs. Then the project team leaves, and with it go the marketing, the reservation phone and the one person who knew which tour operator to call.
Whether a rural tourism project survives depends far less on the quality of its restoration than on whether anyone is still selling the place five years after the ribbon is cut.
The heavy work begins after the opening: being findable, replying quickly, keeping quality steady, getting into tour programs, filling the spring and autumn months, remembering last year’s guests. A plan that budgets for stone and timber but not for five years of operation is, if you ask me, a plan for a very handsome building.
Whose meadow is the car parked on?
Visitors have their share in this as well. A mountain pasture is a working place before it is a view. Families come up from the cities for the weekend, park on someone’s grazing land, set up picnics where the cows usually feed and leave the stream to carry away whatever they forget. A pasture does not need millions of visitors to feel overtourism; a few hundred cars on the wrong weekend are enough. Visiting well means staying on the road, buying from the families who farm up there and leaving the grass as you found it. On a busy summer weekend in high pasture country, the line of cars often climbs further up the meadow than the herds do.