Agri-tourism, which includes on-farm market destinations, community farmers' markets, wineries, and other enterprises, appears to be growing as an opportunity for small to medium-size family farm and food entrepreneurs to increase profits. In addition, this specialized tourism industry offers the opportunity to diversify and strengthen rural economies.Academic literature supports the need to explore consumers' values as they relate to both place and tourism marketing and the marketing of experiences. This project investigates consumer values as they relate to agri-tourism. Consumer values emerged through the use of laddering interviews, a tool of means-end chain theory. Secondarily, how consumers hierarchically organize the brands encountered when engaging agri-tourism experiences was determined.This project supports the idea that there are underlying values which motivate consumers to engage in agri-tourism experiences. The evidence of this is presented in the hierarchical value maps (HVM) for each agri-tourism consumer segment, where attributes are linked to consequences and values. A review of HVMs confirms that for all segments considered the essence of the agri-tourism experience is truly insightful and rewarding. A key discovery of this project is that consumers engage in agri-tourism experiences to seek, at the value level, self-satisfaction and improvement. In addition to underscoring the importance of the self-satisfaction and improvement value, the responses reflect strong emotional values related to the desire to protect the environment, concern about mass marketed food, and the importance of protecting the local economy while feeling profound civic pride. Emotional connections to the farmers and vintners involved in agri-tourism also appeared in the values statements. These themes were reflected in the HVMs for the agri-tourism consumers across three key segments of agri-tourism destination visitors.The results also present an overview of how consumers hierarchically organize the brands encountered when engaging agri-tourism experiences. Four key categories, The Local Products, The Region, The Destination, and The People, emerged. These categories provide the basis for a new Agri-Tourism Experience Model that could be used in subsequent marketing and branding research.
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