Linking Identity and Agritourism Performance: Evidence from Eastern European Agripreneurs

Agritourism is more than a commercial enterprise: it embodies a range of values and reflects local and regional biodiversity, traditions, lifestyles and innovations. This study explores the relationship between agritourism identity and business performance across 290 agritourism enterprises in four countries—Albania, Hungary, North Macedonia, and Poland. Drawing on the agricultural multifunctionality approach and the theory of cultural and territorial identity, agritourism identity was operationalised through four dimensions: natural heritage and environment, anthropogenic cultural heritage and community, inclusivity and social engagement, and collaboration and local integration. Using confirmatory factor analysis, multi-group invariance testing, correlation analysis, OLS regression, structural equation modelling and K-Means clustering, results show that agritourism identity is significantly and independently associated with how operators evaluate their business performance. The two heritage dimensions accounted for most of the variance shared with performance, whereas inclusivity and collaboration did not retain an independent association once the other dimensions were controlled. Identity was not associated with visitor volumes once we controlled for service configuration and country, but stronger identity integration was associated with a higher average spend per night among enterprises reporting a spend figure. Country context significantly moderated the identity–performance relationship. Cluster analysis described three score profiles—strong, moderate and weak identity—which are, however, largely confounded with national context and are therefore reported descriptively. The findings advance a contextually sensitive understanding of identity as a strategic asset in agritourism and suggest differentiated policy considerations across Eastern Europe.