Tourists’ perception of landscape attributes in rural tourism

Purpose The aim of this paper is to identify the perception of tourists towards positive and negative landscape features. Its objective is to classify rural tourists into homogenous groups according to their sensitivity towards specific landscape characteristics. Design/methodology/approach The work is based on quantitative data collection among tourists spending a vacation at agritourism farms. Altogether, 378 valid questionnaires were collected. A K-mean cluster analysis is conducted to group respondents into homogenous groups. Findings The research revealed that tourists particularly enjoy the presence of a landscape comprising orchards, flowery/grassy meadows and vineyards. In contrast, tourists find landscapes that reflects a neglected environment, views of factories, and congested roads to be particularly unpleasant. This work has also identified the presence of three different clusters with distinct sensitivity towards landscape attributes: there are tourists who are highly sensitive to both positi...