Using Craft Tourism to Maximize Revenue of Rural Hospitality Businesses

Abstract

Craft tourism is a new and very popular form of tourism under which the participants travel to seminars and craft schools often in the remote rural areas. In North America the interests in the craft tourism is presently very high. The paper discerns two types of the craft tourists: (1) people who want to participate in the remote school and/or seminar which offer the classes on certain skills and trades, (2) the craft store owners which require seminars on extending their craft skills as well as the classes on types and uses of the new products. The main idea of the paper is combining rural and craft tourism in the same place. Urban crafters visiting the rural areas become not only a source of revenue but also a source of advertising. The number of rural businesses and their small size do not allow them to generate the effective advertisement to the urban crafters. We show that craft tourism can maximize the revenue of the rural hospitality businesses in two different ways: (1) by providing the revenue stream in the off-peak season and (2) by attracting both craft tourists and their spouses in the peak-season thus maximizing hotel revenue stream. We assert that craft tourists may be both source of revenue and advertising vehicle for the rural destinations as they are often parts of craft guilds and collectives. The combination of rural and craft tourism can create a true symbiotic relationship between the rural businesses and the craft guilds.