Rating Rural Hamlets for their Business Start-Up Potentials: Reality or Utopia?

Two main premises provide the basis for this study: the growing interest for rural tourism in the European Union and the availability of more than 20 million unused properties in Italy. This work's main objective is to create an analytical model that can help select the most attractive and competitive rural hamlets where a business for Ospitalità Diffusa (OD) could be successfully set up. The analysis uses the framework of the resource-based view (R-BV) of the firm and employs “tourism potentials” as an operational concept. By building 119 indicators and using factor analysis, 20 villages in Latium were ranked according to each individual locations’ ability to sustain an OD business while attempting to acquire a sustained competitive advantage. The key findings are the model's margin for improvement and the value of the RB-V approach in the inter-disciplinary studies designed to deal with the issue of rural tourist development.