Abstract
In South Tyrol and other European regions, the number of high-quality commercial agritourism businesses is increasing. This development can impact the economic balance between income generated through agricultural and tourism activities. As agritourism is considered to be a supplementary activity to support farming, a predominant income from tourism can be counterproductive to the goals set by legislators and might negatively influence the extent of agricultural activities that should prevail. Consequently, this raises questions about a reasonable complementarity and the economic balance between agricultural and tourism activities. So far, only indicators of time and number of beds are generally used as criteria to measure complementarity. To improve our understanding of the economic situation of commercial agritourism businesses, we compare their turnovers using two calculation models and relate the findings with the UN-SDG targets 2.3, 11a, 12b, and 15.4 from the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Our findings reveal that, in specific cases, there is a significant mismatch between the two revenue streams. Therefore, we suggest stakeholders to favor a more economically driven approach to enable complementarity that also better considers a reasonable relationship between farm and tourism structures. This would also promote a more resilient economic development of farms.