Community-based tourism is vital for the suc-cess of tourism. It seeks a more sustainable form of development because allows host communities to break away from the touristic elites at a national or regional level and therefore seeks to meet their needs and aspirations. The previous understand-ing is even more important in rural laggard regions where agrarian activities seem to lose its power and other economic activities are fragile.
In order to get the involvement of communities, fi rstly we need to observe their perceptions and at-titudes toward the activity. The study here presents based on rural communities from Portugal, sug-gests that nowadays residents don´t have great and positive perceptions toward tourism. On the con-trary, it seems that tourism “benefi ts only a small number of people”, thereby accentuating differ-ences between rich and poor people. Therefore like Cristóvão (1999), we argue that in communities un-der analysis, tourism is yet an elitist activity, devel-oped by people that belong to higher social groups.
Although residents don´t perceive negatives effects toward tourism, we don´t have doubts in saying that the tourism that exists is not the tourism that local people want (cf. Valente & Figueiredo, 2003).
Moreover, the model supports, at least partially, the four hypotheses present at p ≤ 0.050. Indeed, tests confi rm that personal benefi ts from tourism predict positive perceptions toward tourism (at the three dimensions) and socioeconomic negative perceptions. Actually, inferential tests didn´t fi nd any signifi cant relationship between personal ben-efi ts and sociocultural and environmental negative perceptions from tourism. This can be due to the fact that tourists in the regions studied are ‘strand-ed’ on farms and/or tourist resorts and have little contact with local community. Therefore, local community may not experience other costs, with exception of the economic ones.
This study found also that residents´ satisfac-tion was closely related to personal benefi ts from tourism, perceived positive impacts and perceived socioeconomic negative impacts. On the other
hand, it suggests that satisfaction is a concept to keep in mind, in order to get the support of resi-dents and their involvement (cf. Ko & Stewart, 2002). We believe that the support of the commu-nity and their involvement are key to the success of rural tourism and at the same time to the develop-ment of rural communities.
In terms of future research it would be interest-ing extent the study to a large number of residents.
On the other hand, it would be interesting comple-ment quantitative data, with a more qualitative data, maybe with data triangulation or a study case.
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