Abstract

Agritourism farm-stay guesthouses represent a burgeoning sector of rural tourism, wherein locally produced food serves as the primary experiential attraction. This study examines tourist perceptions regarding food quality, sensory characteristics, sustainability awareness, loyalty indicators, and comparative evaluations at three farm-stay guesthouses in Caraș-Severin County, Romania, located at distinct altitudes: lowland (Sacu, 154 m a.s.l.), hill (Văliug, 550 m a.s.l.), and mountain (Cozia, 1130 m a.s.l.). Altitude in this study marks three distinct settings—lowland, hill, mountain—rather than functioning as a tested independent variable. The results show that tourists evaluated all three guesthouses similarly, with no statistically significant differences across zones. The comparative design was a way of asking whether own-farm food quality perceptions hold across different agritourism contexts, not a test of what altitude does to those perceptions. A structured questionnaire (n = 650) was distributed to guests following an informed consent protocol. Four latent constructs were operationalised: food quality (FQ; Cronbach’s α = 0.593), sensory characteristics (SCs; α = 0.596), sustainability perception (SP; α = 0.393), and comparison with non-farm establishments (CF; α = 0.621). Overall gastronomic satisfaction was particularly high (mean = 4.71 ± 0.62 on a 1–5 Likert scale), and the average overall score was 9.44 ± 1.01 out of 10. Multiple regression accounted for 7.5% of the satisfaction variance (R2 = 0.075; F(4,643) = 13.09, p < 0.001), with sensory characteristics (β = 0.232, p < 0.001) and sustainability perception (β = 0.088, p = 0.020) serving as significant predictors. Food origin transparency substantially impacted satisfaction (ANOVA: F(3,646) = 4.964, p = 0.002): visitors who received thorough provenance explanations were more satisfied (mean = 4.77) than those who received no information (mean = 4.57). Among the 569 respondents with prior non-farm experience, 85.2% rated farm-stay cuisine as superior to non-farm alternatives overall. Food quality perceptions in these three Caraș-Severin guesthouses are uniformly high regardless of altitude. What separates more satisfied guests from less satisfied ones is not the measurable quality of the product but whether the host explained where it came from.

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