What is Advanced Integration

This chapter investigates a new tendency of local tourism entrepreneurs, who are identified as next generation entrepreneurs in this study in destinations wherein tourism has already become the main economic activity. This tendency represents the efforts of integrating the agricultural production with tourism activities by being (a) the owner of a tourism capacity and being either the owner or the organizer of an agricultural production; and (b) establishing complementary relations between tourism and agriculture. Findings show that integration between tourism and agriculture has already produced a multiplicity of integration modes including different levels of marketing, and has had a series of distinctive features which do not only depend on geographical characteristics of destinations but also on socio-economic and socio-spatial features of rural settlements including the tourist characteristics. Findings also show that an actual integration seems to be an endeavor of the entrepreneur which depends on functional solidarity between tourism and agriculture.