The study adopts critical realism philosophy, utilising qualitative and quantitative methods to address limitations of each method. A sequential mixed methods approach was employed by a series of semi-structured interviews to 31 rural tourism destination stakeholders. Maximum sampling criteria was used by including representatives of government, businesses, community/NGO, and tourists. Purposive sampling was used through personal contacts to obtain heterogeneous participants. Tourist participants had experience in visiting rural Bali at least once in the last 7 years, when DRT, the newest transport mode, started to exist. Stakeholder participants were involved in the tourism or transport sector related to Bali travel. Snowball sampling was used to identify further participants by utilising previous participants' references. Particular to the stakeholder group, an invitation letter and terms of reference were added as a locally appropriate means of participant recruitment. It was followed by a self-administered questionnaire survey to 457 tourists visiting rural attractions in Bali island, Indonesia, from December 2023 to January 2024 at three most prominent rural tourism locations: Jatiluwih, Batur, and Penglipuran. Quota sampling was applied and respondents were approached by a next-to-pass basis.