An analysis of the stability of rural tourism as a desired condition for sustainable tourism Guaita Martínez, José Manuel Martín Martín, José María José Antonio, Salinas Fernández Helena, Mogorrón Guerrero Rural tourism Economic sustainability Seasonality Spain Sustainable development Index Tourism is a key sector in the sustainable development of rural environments. Its ability to create stable employment and an acceptable level of profits is conditioned by the stability of tourist activity throughout the year. This paper compares the level of seasonality of a group of rural destinations to that of coastal and urban destinations. By doing so, we intend to determine whether seasonality-related problems exist in the rural environment or not. The second aim is related to the first one: the proposal of a new, more comprehensive and objective methodology that can measure the intensity of seasonality based on a DP2 synthetic indicator. The DP2 indicator groups information about different representative variables of seasonality. The study takes the main tourist spots in Spain as a reference. The analysis concludes that the annual level of stability of rural tourism is not far from the stability of urban tourism, which is the most stable, as seasonality is much higher in coastal destinations. The methodology that provides the framework to build the DP2 indicator has allowed us to identify which variables explain the differences in the level of seasonality of each destination to a large extent. The results showed that the variables that do so are related to the internalization of the destination and changes in the availability of bed places. 2024-01-29T09:38:08Z 2024-01-29T09:38:08Z 2019-03-30 info:eu-repo/semantics/article An analysis of the stability of rural tourism as a desired condition for sustainable tourism, Journal of Business Research, Volume 100, 2019, Pages 165-174, ISSN 0148-2963, https://hdl.handle.net/10481/87452 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2019.03.033 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional Elsevier