The Challenges of Internationalizing Agritourism Businesses in Iran

In recent years, tourism has become a powerful and profitable business. This emerging trade has increased the competitiveness of businesses to diversify services and products to attract more tourists. Among the types of tourism, agritourism has been paid attention in many countries. This type of tourism can be a place for tourists education and recreation, and it can generate employment, more income, sustainable investment, production boom, prevent migration and so on. Finally, it will contribute to sustainable agricultural development. Despite the potential of the villages in Iran, this type of tourism has not been able to gain its status and not introduced to world tourists. Therefore, the present study aims at examining and identifying the challenges of internationalizing agritourism businesses in the Iran. The statistical population of this qualitative study is 23 agritourism experts in the country and the process of data collection was done through semi-structured interviews with snowball sampling. Coding of data, selection of categories and extraction of results were performed by MAXQDA software. For the validity of the research, the extracted data are investigated in the focus group are investigated. The findings show that there are two categories of "direct" and "indirect" challenges in the internationalization of agritourism businesses including lack of recognition, lack of education, rules and regulations, special challenges, Strategies, weaknesses in marketing, cultural and political conditions, and tours problems. Investigating these challenges shows that agritourism is not recognized in the country and the internationalization of these types of businesses has not been successful.