Description
Book SynopsisTourism 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.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Hence Tourism Microentrepreneurship; Duarte B. Morais
Part I. Understanding Tourism Microentrepreneurs
Chapter 1. Opportunities and Challenges at the Margins of Seaborne Tourism; Deserie Avila and Michael J. Pisani
Chapter 2. Microentrepreneurial Motivations and Perceived Benefits in Laos; Scott A. Hipsher
Chapter 3. Tourism Microentrepreneurship in Family Farms; Victoria Patterson, Duarte B. Morais, and Bruno S. Ferreira
Chapter 4. Gender and Benefit-sharing in Indigenous Tourism Microentrepreneurship; Alexander Trupp, Ilisapeci Matalolu, and Apisalome Movono
Part II. Microentrepreneurial Knowledge
Chapter 5. Local Knowledge in Tourism Microentrepreneurship; Kathleen M. Adams and Dirk Sandarupa
Chapter 6. Creative Tourism Microentrepreneurs in Portugal; Fiona Eva Bakas, Nancy Duxbury, and Sara Albino
Chapter 7. ICT Innovation Diffusion by Tourism Microentrepreneurs; Yasong (Alex) Wang
Chapter 8. Reactions to the Sharing Economy by Tourism Stakeholders; Hessam Sarooghi and Seyedeh Elahe Adel Rastkhiz
Part III. Integrated Destination Stewardship
Chapter 9. Place-based Rural Tourism Microentrepreneurship in Vojvodina; Jovana Čikić and Tamara Jovanović
Chapter 10. Cultural Representation by Local Food Microenterprises; Robert Bowen
Chapter 11. A Destination’s Embrace of Tourism Microentrepreneurship; Jonathan Freeze
Chapter 12. Conceptualizing Permatourism; Bruno S. Ferreira, Duarte B. Morais, Gene L. Brothers, Craig Brookins, and Susan Jakes
Conclusion: Principled Engagement with Tourism Microentrepreneurs; Duarte B. Morais
