Bed and breakfast, homestay and farmstay: forms and experiences

[Extract] The recognition of the commercial home as used in bed and breakfast and farmstays as a separate and distinctive form of tourist accommodation offers opportunities to develop new conceptual approaches to understanding a range of different aspects of tourism. The facets of particular relevance in the present chapter include the role of tourist accommodation in the tourist experience, the host-guest relationship and the nature of tourism development, especially in more rural and peripheral regions. In order to develop these conceptual analyses of the commercial home in tourism it is important to understand the key dimensions and categories of the phenomenon under study. This chapter will argue that tourist accommodation provided in commercial homes incorporates a number of different forms of tourism experience and that understanding the key dimensions that determine these forms is an important prerequisite for the development of more integrated theoretical frameworks.\ud \ud After a brief review of definitions and presentation of different geographical histories of commercial home accommodation, a case study of tourists using commercial homes for accommodation in the North Queensland region of Australia will be employed to demonstrate the existence of a continuum of forms of commercial home accommodation. Pressures on this continuum will be reviewed before a systems model of the commercial home accommodation phenomenon is presented. This systems model is based on a review of key literature. It will be argued that this system includes a number of tensions and that these tensions differ according to where a particular commercial home is located on the continuum of forms of accommodation. Each form of accommodation is associated with a different set of tensions, giving rise to different challenges and outcomes