Rural Tourism Creative Innovations in Italy and Kazakhstan as a Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Revisiting Rural Leisure and Travel

This chapter presents the results of qualitative research exploring innovative developments by rural tourism sites in Italy and Kazakhstan in response to the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This chapter draws attention to the quintessential components of tourism, such as leisure and recreation, distance and associated travel experience, as essential determinants of rural tourism’s innovative developments during the pandemic. The authors conceptualise the model of rural tourism creative innovation in the COVID-19 pandemic and use it to explore how rural tourist sites in two countries, Italy and Kazakhstan, revisited their tourism resources during the pandemic. It was found that despite differing tourism resources and differences in established forms of rural tourism in these two countries, the rural sites applied creative means to underscore the rural tourism experience as a source and enabler of human well-being. Acknowledging many inherent sustainability values that are at the core of rural tourism’s appeal and tourism products, this chapter concludes that the pandemic revealed new perspectives on both the strength and fragility of rural tourism as a sustainable form of tourism, calling for practitioners and scholars to reassess the understanding of rurality in sustainable tourism development.