Effects of agritourism businesses’ strategies to cope with the COVID-19 crisis: The key role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) behaviours

Abstract

Evidence of the effects of tourism businesses’ strategies to mitigate the negative impacts of the COVID-19 crisis remains remarkably scarce. Drawing on the system resilience framework, this study suggests a model in which corporate social responsibility (CSR) behaviours encompassing five dimensions – community, employees, environment, heritage and products – and co-creation experience mediate the relationships between strategies and performance. Applying partial least squares structural equation modeling to a sample of 199 agritourism businesses in Italy, this study finds that proactive strategies have a positive effect on performance and that this effect is fully mediated by CSR and co-creation experience. Reactive strategies have both a negative direct effect and a positive mediated effect on performance. Hence, the strategies positively affect performance only if they first contribute to the resilience of the local system through CSR behaviours, enhancing the resources needed for tourism experience co-creation. This analysis emphasises the impacts of the community, environmental and heritage dimensions of CSR behaviours.