Summary
Tourism microentrepreneurship is defined as the process of launching a new, or adding value to an existing, enterprise with no more than five employees, providing tourism experiences, food, lodging or transportation, with the aim to support the owner’s livelihood and desired lifestyle.
Volume 12 of Bridging Tourism Theory and Practice provides an overview of emerging scholarship and best practices on the development and integration of tourism microentrepreneurship in destination stewardship. Tourists have been breaking out of staged tourism enclaves for many decades, but only recently have information technologies empowered: a) tourists with information about destinations and supply, and b) entrepreneurial hosts with marketplaces.
Tourism microentrepreneurs’ business activity is often informal and fluid, therefore, they have only recently become a visible and increasingly influential stakeholder group. As a result, they are not yet well studied, and practitioners struggle to support and integrate them into destination stewardship. Nevertheless, emerging evidence suggests that fuelling tourism microentrepreneurship and its integration in destination systems can generate added benefits to the host populations while making the destination more competitive and unique. Conversely, there is evidence that when left unbridled, tourism microentrepreneurship can erode the local character of neighborhoods and hurt the image of an entire destination.
Tourism Microentrepreneurship shares scholarship and best practices to educate practitioners and to encourage more research on the development of microentrepreneurship and its impact on destination communities.
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