Działania marketingowe gospodarstw agroturystycznych w wybranych powiatach województwa warmińsko-mazurskiego

Abstract

Farm tourism has been a popular topic for some time now. Tourists demonstrate an increasing tendency to choose places distant from traditional holiday destinations because in the latter numerous attractions are accompanied by excessive concentration of visitors on a small area and exorbitant prices. Local politicians perceive farm tourism as an opportunity to boost the local economy and to reduce unemployment. Farmers seek other possibilities of obtaining income from their farms. However, informing a prospective customer about offered services is a prerequisite for any business activity. Like hotel clients, farm tourism clients are scattered over a large area. This paper is an attempt to investigate the condition of marketing activities of tourist farms. The aim of the research conducted in March 2004 was the identification of the methods of attracting customers employed by tourist farms on areas not covered by any associations as well as the evaluation of the efficiency of these methods. Based on address lists obtained from local tourist information offices, survey questionnaires were sent to 43 tourist farms located in the Kętrzyn district and the Węgorzewo district in the Warmia-Mazury Voivodeship. Eighteen questionnaires (41.9%) were returned. Tourist farms participating in the survey offered 7–24 beds, but a majority (72.2%) possessed up to 12 beds. What is both interesting and simultaneously surprising, it is in the areas frequently visited, for historical reasons, by German citizens, where domestic visitors are particularly expected to arrive (62.9%). A fall in the interest in foreign visitors was noticed earlier. In the majority of cases (62.9%) tourist farm owners are geared towards providing services for customers interested in holidays at affordable prices. This demonstrates that they may be familiar with wealthy clients’ high requirements and aware of their farms’ inadequacies. According to tourist farm owners, the most important factor in attracting customers is furnishings and equipment of the farm. 77.8% of the farms pointed to the inadequate furnishings and equipment as the major reason for difficulty in attracting customers. The second most important problem is the lack of or insufficient extra services; the clients whose accommodation needs have been satisfied notice lack of services that require considerable financial outlays such as horses or carts. This points to the need to provide more financial resources for the modernisation and furnishing of the buildings belonging to tourist farms. According to the respondents, the major factors that help attract clients include customer recommendation (89% of answers), the Internet (61%), and the information provided by tourist information offices and local government offices (50%). The questionnaire included a question concerning the cost of advertising. Only 22.2% of respondents did not report any cost of advertising activity or did not answer the question. The other respondents reported annual expenditure ranging from 100 PLN to 2100 PLN. The average annual publicity expenditure amounted to 410 PLN per farm, 32.5 PLN per bed and 1.0 PLN per night sold. The figures appear to be low, but in many cases average publicity expenditure constitutes approx. 10% of the price of bed per night, for each night even in the case of a few days’ stays. This seems to suggest that a significant number of tourist farm owners spend the money allocated to publicity inefficiently. If the efficiency of advertising activity is measured in terms of nights sold per bed, farms that report publicity expenditure achieve more than twice as good results as those that do not: – farms reporting publicity expenditure achieved 37 nights sold per bed; – farms reporting no publicity expenditure achieved 16.6 nights sold per bed. One of the most important aims of the survey was the evaluation of major problems in attracting visitors. According to the respondents, the most important factors in this respect are as follows: – inadequate standard of services offered by the farms; – insufficient actions aimed at attracting customers; – inefficient spending of money allocated to publicity. The factors enumerated above imply that even larger financial means allocated to publicity will not lead to better results. The improvement in the efficiency of tourist farms requires actions in two areas. Firstly, activities aimed at making financial resources for the development of farm tourism more available are required. This refers to the improvement in basic facilities (e.g. the standard of rooms, the furnishing of bathrooms) as well as providing the equipment that makes the stay on a farm more enjoyable. As results from the survey, those farms that report the insufficiency of standard and equipment in a lesser extent achieve better results. Secondly, farms should be given access to information about tourist service market. A particularly adequate assistance offered to tourist farm owners involves training in the form of free or partially payable workshops. The training should take account of the problem of adjusting services to customers’ needs, including the minimum of the required standard, as well as the issue of publicity, especially publicity via the Internet. The training of this sort is offered by the voivodeship agriculture consultancy centres, but the survey conducted by the author, along with the results achieved by tourist farms, demonstrates that those who set up such farms are not aware of the distinctive character of this area of business activity. The conclusions drawn above should attract local government institutions’ attention to the problems of farm tourism. They also provide some information for institutions that have financial resources for the development of agriculture at their disposal about how to distribute the money so that farm tourism could develop.