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Microentrepreneurs have played a role in the tourism industry for a long time; however, they are now becoming more visible and increasingly influential stakeholders due to information technologies that enable them to reach prospective visitors, and because their economic activity is more transparent and taxable by governments. Nevertheless, tourism microentrepreneurship is still understudied, and destination practitioners are largely unprepared to fuel microentrepreneurial development and to integrate these genuine, local experiences with the formal sector components of the industry. This chapter provides an introductory overview of related knowledge as a basis for identification of themes in research on tourism microentrepreneurship.

Rural subaltern people are generally relegated to the role of passive tourees, allowed to informally glean bits of income not worthwhile to the formal tourism industry. However, under some circumstances, microentrepreneurs find ways to take advantage of opportunities afforded by tourism to improve their livelihoods and gain human agency. The People-First Tourism Lab employs a participatory action research methodology to investigate tourism microentrepreneurship and its effect on participating individuals and communities. In this chapter, the authors provide a background of the project implemented in the State of North Carolina, USA, explain the research methodology, and outline current and forthcoming efforts.

The neo-endogenous approach to rural development puts great importance on territorialization, and aligns with place-based strategies and with microentrepreneurship because both concepts consider local specificities and leveraging local resources. This chapter analyzes characteristics of rural tourism establishments in Vojvodina, Northern Province of Serbia, of which the majority are microenterprises. The discussion focuses on aspects of microenterprise functioning such as human capital, offers, revenues, and non-material benefits. The aim is to analyze the local embeddedness of rural tourism microenterprises and their contribution to neo-endogenous rural development. Our results reveal that microentrepreneurs are embedded in rural places, but they face numerous constraints which in turn limits the benefits host communities might receive from place-based rural tourism development.

Advances in information and communication technology have revolutionized the tourism industry. This development has blurred geographical boundaries, facilitated low transaction costs by directly connecting travelers to hosts and service providers, and improved service quality and distribution. The tourism industry, however, is in the midst of another massive change. The emergence of sharing economy platforms, such as Airbnb and Uber, is disrupting business models and is providing opportunities for microentrepreneurship. The goal of this chapter is to study how the changing nature of tourism business models and the increasing importance of microentrepreneurship are impacting value creation, capture, and delivery in tourism.

Prior research documents that host communities struggle to influence tourism product design and destination management; however, emerging information and communication technologies (ICTs) are allowing host communities to bypass retail monopolies and create self-representation. This chapter examines how to make technological innovation endogenous to a regional growth model by identifying barriers constraining the adoption of innovation among rural microentrepreneurs in Pennsylvania. Insights about adoption of ICTs were gathered through participatory action engagement and semi-structured interviews with a network of rural tourism microentrepreneurs. Analysis revealed that microentrepreneurs perceive that tracking and monitoring customer inquiries is very time consuming, and they feel that using these platforms diverts them from achieving their desired lifestyles.

Indigenous entrepreneurship is not only driven by capitalistic ideas as inherent in Eurocentric microentrepreneurial thinking but also focuses on communal approaches where entire communities can gain social and/or economic benefits. The authors, who all worked at The University of the South Pacific in Fiji, share how they work and engage with students and indigenous communities involved in tourism microenterprises. Based on the authors' research and experience in the region, this chapter discusses the following two issues and their related best practices and implications. First, the balance and sometimes tensions between entrepreneurial self-benefit and benefit-sharing; and second, female participation and the related opportunities for empowerment of indigenous communities through tourism microentrepreneurship.

Microentrepreneurship is emerging as a key area of tourism research due to its increasing visibility and economic significance. Microentrepreneurs have complex pecuniary and non-pecuniary motivations, they combine multiple forms of knowledge to achieve success, and they can generate circularity and competitiveness when integrated into formal destination systems. Continued research on this topic is needed, but careful consideration of the ethics and methods used is recommended. This chapter assembles findings in this volume and in the tourism literature to propose a roadmap for principled engagement with microentrepreneurs.

For many decades, destination marketing organizations have evolved in their structure and in their programming, especially as targeted toward leisure travel and tourism markets. They changed their focus to internet communication, then to brand strategy and destination management, and most recently to address disruptions from the tourism online gig economy consisting of myriad microentrepreneurs, some sharing local experiences directly with tourists. This chapter relates how Raleigh, USA, and its tourism office have begun to embrace tourism microentrepreneurship through strategic planning efforts and specific programs of the last five years. It concludes with implications for how small and medium destinations can structure new programs, policies, and interactions to support marketplaces of tourism microentrepreneurs as part of holistic tourism-related economic development.