1. General

Istria's agritourism and rural tourism development program was operatively set in motion in 1996, when the Istrian County Tourist Board initiated specific activities to aid the development of the continental region of Istria. Considerable results were achieved in the department of development of tourism in rural areas over the period of ten years of intensive development. The number of agritourisms engaged in Istrian rural tourism grows continually and we are already able to speak about the figure of approximately 250 agritourisms that can be classified into the following marketing types or categories: agritourism, rural vacation houses, rural family hotels, stancija (villas), rural B&B's, wine road accommodation and tasting rooms.

A SWOT analysis of Istria's rural tourism has shown that the providers of tourist services on agritourisms are insufficiently networked and that there are dangers such as mass approach to service providing, commercialization to the detriment of ambience and disappearance of individual agricultural producers as carriers of the production of traditional products, showing a compelling need to establish a professional association that would address all the aspects of Istria's agritourism and rural tourism. Ruralis is the answer to the need for a stronger, more purposeful and professional association.

RURALIS is a consortium of agritourism and rural tourism in Istria that represents a contract interest association of partakers of Istria's agritourism and rural tourism through an autonomous and professional institution. Apart from the existing critical agritourism mass, the association is based also on Istria's tourism master plan for the period 2002-2012 that elaborates on the necessity to organize DMCs (destination management companies) and DMOs (destination management organizations) for various already profiled forms of tourist products that would take over all further activities associated with a specific tourist product, in this case with rural tourism.

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