Nothing new in the [digitized] country.

E-commerce and websites are quite established digital solutions in agritourism. Nevertheless, the sector always meets the same or new challenges with the evolution of digitization (2020). Here are the two challenges that, in my opinion, are if not the biggest the most interesting ones, and maybe the most relevant too in the long term (emphasis mine).

“Challenge one” is “to synchronise multiple [e-commerce] platforms and coordinate them with their own calendar and websites… Coordination and synchronisation of many booking sites is not an obvious task and requires advanced skills for management software of multiple online booking services."

“Challenge two” is the physical delivery of goods to the final consumer: “the lack of a specialised delivery channel for food products can endanger their final quality and integrity… [It] would be a good idea, to delegate the packaging and shipping activities to one single intermediator who can collect the orders from multiple farmers and deliver them to the various consumers”.

Wait! We already know those challenges!

Lack of “coordination and synchronization” between booking websites is substantially the SAME lack of adversarial interoperability that plagues social media. Or, as already revealed by another study, “another critical obstacle to happy digitization is the absence of interoperability and standard formats”.

Finally, the “one single intermediator” the agritourism operators miss could just be what I called “Amazon, transformed in a global standard”.

Recognizing what the real obstacles to success are is the first step to overcome them. Don’t forget that, in agritourism or any other field.