Is There a Need for More Effective Quality Awards for Agritourisms?

Farm holidays are becoming more and more frequent in the choices of people. First of all, this is due to the less costs related to such kind of accommodation. But, apart this mere reason, it’s evident that farm holidays, thanks to the possibility of assessing closer relationships with people living in the surrounding areas, induce a sort of relational tourism, in this way facilitating the cultural exchanges between hosting and visiting people. This last motivation seems to be an additional attractive reason for people in selecting such farms for their holiday’s trips. The present paper speculates about the possible features of a new quality award for holidays farms, able to take into account not only the service and its environmental performances, but also the quality of the food offered to people that, generally, is produced inside the same farm, that is the so called "farm holidays with working farm". The proposed approach, for the accommodation services will refer to the existing European Ecolabel scheme for hotels and camp-sites. Moreover, for the quality of the food, the suggested scheme will refer to the well known food labels, concerning the quality of the product itself and the whole chain of production. Finally, the impact exerted on the environment by these facilities and by the agricultural activities related with them is here supposed to be assessed by means of a Life Cycle Analysis approach.