Romanian Wine Tourism—A Paved Road or a Footpath in Rural Tourism?

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Overall, this paper has great potential to add to current scholarship's understanding of wine tourism. However, in its current form, the manuscript has several weaknesses that must be addressed.

The biggest difficulty for me is the background of assumptions mentioned in the section 3.1. The authors have made a very detailed literature review, but how does it relate to the assumptions? The explanation in this regard is still insufficient or does not make the relationship clear.

 

The manuscript is well written albeit the analysis methodology not well demonstrated. I suggest the authors supplement the description and principle of quantitative analysis methods.

 

Lastly, I suggest you add the data calculation procedures and results to the appendix.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

I desagree with the phrase where the article claims in point 2.2 that wine tourism research is relatively recent. The wine tourism research strated in the 1980s. This phrase must be eliminated from the text. The research on the profile about wine tourists is relatively recent and not wine tourism

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The article 'Romanian Wine Tourism – a Paved Road or a Footpath in Rural Tourism? ' addresses an important topic for the current context, as tourist modalities that move regional or interior flow are ways for the sector to recover from the crisis generated by Covid-19. Thus, I recommend its publication, but after some adjustments.

The text needs improvement, so I suggest to the authors:
1. Writing review. There are repeated paragraphs (see lines 82 to 91);
2. There are paragraphs with monotone writing. For example, in the first part of the theoretical foundation, you have 6 paragraphs tarting with 'Wine tourism..."
3. The different classifications you present of tourist groups, motivations, income generation, etc... Choose some and transform them into figures to vary the way of presenting the information, making the text more fluid for the reader;
4. In the presentation of the results in Table 2, the mean has no meaning to categorize variables as gender and age. What is gender 1.54? or Age 1,78? In this case, you must use frequency. Income and studies in Table 2 present the same problem. You should show the results directly. What is the value of the average income of the visitors? The same situation is indicated in table 3.
5. Figure 1 presents one of the main contributions of your study. Thus, you need to explore this finding further in the text.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

The topic raised in this paper is very interesting and the theoretical part was well prepared, referencing over 100 sources. The minor changes that could be improved include a clear and direct description in the abstract and in the conclusions what is this research impact to sustainability. In other words, it should be highlighted more that the study falls into the scope of the journal. There is also a very significant flaw in the results analysis. First of all the regression model lacks the OR (odds ratio). The methodology section should clearly list all the applied methods and tests that were conducted and to which variables which test and method was used. The descriptive statistics calculated for binary nominal variables (like gender) and ordinal variables (age in form of intervals or income) are not a recommended approach in science (they make sense to some extend), but those should rather presented in structural form (% share). The calculation of descriptive statistics (mean, median, quantiles etc.) for nominal non binary variables is nonsense (like the authors did for example with the wine color). Let me provide an example: let’s assume that all 4 vine colors share the same popularity among the respondents, so 25% like white, 25% rose, 25% red and 25% sparkling. If I apply the method used in this paper the ranks I’ll assign to given color affect the end results. If we assume white is 1, rose 2, red 3, and sparkling is 4. The mean value will be 2,5 falsely indicating that there is a preference towards red. If I assign the ranks in a reversed order for the colors, so  bubbled 1, red 2, rose 3 and whit 4. In the same example the mean will be again 2,5 which now means that there is a preference towards rose? The same applies to the taste, package and “combs”. This affects all the further results and is statistically incorrect, which probably will affect the final results. Therefore my recommendation is to reconsider the paper only after a major review in which authors redo the analytic part of the paper using proper statistical methods for given variables.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 4 Report

Thank you for your reply and the hard work put into correcting the paper. It is now much clearer, and the data makes more sense. Good luck with future research, and I wish you much success.