A Critical Review of Success Factors for Sustainable Agritourism Development

Abstract

Sustainable agritourism development is at the apex of contemporary discussions on sustainable tourism development as evidenced by enormous studies being done on this tourism concept. This review paper discussed the contributions of one hundred and five (105) research articles that were published in several tourism journals. The main objective of this paper was to establish the current state of literature on Success Factors (SFs) for sustainable agritourism development, identify research gaps, suggest areas of future study and draw lessons that are of importance to the development of agritourism in Zimbabwe. Statistical analysis was employed in order to establish the distribution of the sampled research articles over time, by continent, distribution by research method, distribution by research approach and distribution by research themes. The results of this study revealed that research on agritourism development is biased towards the developed countries, most of the research used qualitative research with focus more on the supply side and little has been done to establish the requirements and CSFs for the development of this tourism concept. The findings of this study provide a baseline upon which future studies in agritourism, could be build.