Agritourism Development in the USA: The Strategy of the State of Michigan

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper offers a very detailed and enlightening picture of agritourism in Michigan. It reads well, cites relevant literature and uses the TALC model appropriately to carefully analyze the development of this type of tourism. 

Besides the exhaustive analysis on external factors and institutions around the development and support of agritourism, the reviewer misses the chance to highlight the evolution of the enterprise itself - from being only agriculture-oriented, to being more tourism-oriented. The business perspective, if considered, could highlight additional interesting features of agritourism and its historical development. For instance, the Alps - cited at the beginning of the paper - face the problem of having agritourism activities that are progressively loosing their agricultural character and are becoming too much tourism-oriented. What about the evolution of the business in the USA?

Some minor remarks on formatting are listed below: 

• Please revise the abstract, e.g. "little attention has been paid attention"
• Table one: please consider to insert shorter headings to the table, as they are too long and confusing for the reader.
• Please make sure that highlights and red parts of the text are eliminated from the final version of the paper

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

In the manuscript the authors presented an important point, although the manuscript has some drawbacks.

Main remarks:

1. Intruduction - what is the research gap? Introduction should be extended with the factors of the development of agritourism in the present times. What was the definition of agritourism adopted by the authors for the purposes of the presented manuscript? What are the directions of agritourism development nowadays? Are innovations needed to expand the offer of agritourism farms? What is the opinion of the authors? I think you can also write a paragraph about how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed agritourism? Also in the USA - Michigan. Suggested publications: doi.org/10.3390/su12124858, doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2017.03.002

2. Materials and Methods - in my opinion, new input to science is missing from the manuscript, e.g. the synthetic index of agritourism development in the state of michigan. Variables that show how agritourism can develop there now. I recommend using statistical and taxonomic methods. This will greatly enrich the manuscript.

3. Conclusions - in your conclusions, please also answer the following questions:
• what are the research gaps?
• what is new to this manuscript?

4. Additional remarks:

- The presented manuscript is very interesting. This applies to the current situation in agritourism.

- In my opinion, there is no need to bold the footnotes in square brackets.

- In my opinion, footnote 39 in the literature list is not a scientific source - Wikipedia.

- It is very important what the authors write at the end of the manuscript: "that agritourism can be seen as a paradigm of new agriculture and new tourism". Agritourism is constantly changing and owners of agritourism farms should look for new solutions.

- Incorrectly pasted figure 1 (line 363).

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The historical path depicted in the paper about the Michigan state is interesting. Anyway, the chapter 3, that is about the characteristics of Michigan’s agritourism development, is too long and does not keep the attention of the reader since it gives neither useful nor important information. I suggest reducing the length to less than 50% of the present.

Apart this, the paper suffers of an important weakness.

The special issue the authors submitted the paper is about sustainability and rural tourism. Although an interesting literature review about rural tourism is present in the paper, the link between sustainability and rural tourism is not investigated. Nevertheless, the authors stated that “Agritourism is one of the sustainable development paths that both developed and developing countries must follow” (at row 402). The authors should capitalize results of scholars which explored extensively agritourism and sustainability from different perspectives and in diverse cultural contexts. I suggest reading the work of Ammirato et al. and Barbieri et al. (see references) that can give important contrast references of the agritourism in Europe and North America.

In conclusion, the authors should clearly highlight the strong link between rural tourism and sustainability both, in the literature review section and in the Michigan case study analysis  

References

• Ammirato, A.M. Felicetti, C. Raso, B. Pansera, A. Violi (2020) – “Agritourism and Sustainability: What We Can Learn from a Systematic Literature Review”, Sustainability, 12(22), pp. 9575- 9593
• Ammirato, A.M. Felicetti (2014) – “The Agritourism as a means of sustainable development for rural communities: a research from the field “,The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies. 8(1), pp. 17-29.
• Barbieri, C. (2013) – “Assessing the sustainability of agritourism in the US: A comparison between agritourism and other farm entrepreneurial ventures”. Journal of Sustainable Tourism. 21, pp.252–270
• Santeramo, F.G.; Barbieri, C, (2017) – “On the demand for agritourism: A cursory review of methodologies and practice”, Tourism Planning & Development. 14, pp. 139–148.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Reviewer 3 Report

All the improvement suggestions have been addressed.