The tourism system is frequently dominated by large urban destinations with more resources and closer ties to industry networks encompassing media, retail, transportation, attractions and lodging. Rural Destinations often feel tempted to emulate their bigger peers, but the current market demand for genuine, imperfect, unstandardized, local, unscripted experiences provides rural destinations with a remarkable opportunity to reinventing tourism marketing and development to fit their strengths. In this session we will explain the structure and process behind People-First Tourism’s proprietary programs and see examples of applications using this process from destinations in the US and abroad.

1. Enhancing rural destination equity and competitiveness
through People-First Tourism's permatourism development
approach

2. Host communities survive from gleaning
the scraps of the tourism industry.
The problem

3. crafting Orientalist images of
the host (Britton 1979)
re-engineering local identities
(Bandyopadhyay & Morais,
2005)
transforming hosts into
passive tourees (Cohen,
2001)
3
Governments and formal tourism sector interact
with host communities in neo-colonial ways
3

4. appropriating local heritages and physical resources
for economic or “preservation goals” set by outsiders
(Manyara & Jones, 2007)
4
Governments and formal tourism sector interact
with host communities in neo-colonial ways
2001
2017
4

5. Yet…
Tourism can also create stages where locals resist the
control of formal systems, with voices which counter
formal sector narratives and earn agency (Wang &
Morais, 2014).
5

6. And…
In under-regulated spaces, microentrepreneurs can
offer unscripted and unsanctioned tourism experiences
which significantly improve livelihoods (Usher &
Morais, 2010)
6

7. Challenges experienced by tourism
micro-entrepreneurs
● Lack of access to tourist markets
● Lack of knowledge of the preferences of
tourists
● Markets are controlled by DMO messaging and
external tour operator itineraries
7

8. Challenges experienced by tourism
micro-entrepreneurs
● Arrival of less desirable tourists who spend
little and expect much
● Lack of means for receiving reservations and
payments
8

9. Action

10. 10
Market opportunity
● Upsurge of demand for genuine experiences
● Web-based tech startups which share information
● Death of the infomediary
● Growth of socio-entrepreneurship
○ Discerning markets
○ New business models

11. People-First Tourism
Glocal participatory action research advancing the way
tourism microentrepreneurship fosters sustainability and
self-determination of individuals with vulnerable
livelihoods
11

12. Methodological positioning
Participatory Action Research
○ Integrating participants in the research process – to
promote their awareness of privilege and oppression
relationships (Freire) & human agency (Sen);
12

13. Methodological positioning
Participatory Action Research
13
• Maintaining long term
relationships with participants
– to generate longitudinal
strong-inference data;
• Incorporating a social venture
(Yunus) – to create income
opportunities to participants

14. www.peoplefirsttourism.com 14

15. 15
P1t is a social venture supporting a consortium of engaged
academic teams collaborating with community partners to
enable the success of microentrepreneurs.

16. Accompaniment of vetted microentrepreneurs
● Trained students co-create web profiles to insert into P1t
portal
● P1tLab staff and local partners, continuously
revise/monitor/train
16
16

17. Working with local empowerment agents
● DMOs, Cooperative extension, NGOs,
grassroots orgs., etc.
17

18. P1t Research

19. #1. Linking local livelihoods with a resource generates local
support for its conservation
Purpose: To examine the role of
tourism microentrepreneurship in
shaping pro-conservation behaviors
Findings: Men are primarily involved in
wildlife tourism, thus they internalize
pro-conservation motivations; women’s
lives improved but not their pro-
conservation motivations
Morais et al. (2015). TRI
19

20. Purpose: to examine the desired
narratives of tourism
microentrepreneurs
Findings: locals want to educate
visitors about local region and culture;
they want to showcase their efforts to
help sustain dying skills & traditions
20
#2. Integrating local unscripted voices in the tourism product
allows locals to shape the destination
Morais et al. (2014). TTRA

21. Purpose: to examine how rural
microentrepreneurs want to promote
themselves to potential urban visitors
Findings: microentrepreneurs use a
mix of anti-urbanormative images
and also images that portray them in
stereotypical ways
21
#3. Locals will represent themselves to resist stereotypes AND
also to meet visitor preferences
Shahab et al. (2018). Rural Society
vqmethod.com

22. Purpose: to examine how microentrepreneurs network
Findings: In business networks including well-established
entrepreneurs and aspiring/informal microentrepreneurs,
there is collaboration and information flow if…
Marketplace has embedded collectivism
Trust, reciprocity and togetherness
(cognitive social capital)
22
#4. Nurturing integrated networks of micro/entrepreneurs leads
to equitable success
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KC et al. (2017). THR

23. Purpose: to understand the effect of VR farm experiences on
urbanites’ intentions to visit farms
Findings: preliminary findings
suggest that VR farm visit
reduces perceived constraints
to book hands-on farm
experience from
microentrepreneurs
23
#5. Virtual reality tours may help mass tourists negotiate
genuine travel constraints

24. Permatourism

25. Problem
● Marketing is more effective when it is evidence-based
● TDA/DMOs need to measure conversion and impact
● Structured data only comes from formal sector
○ Growing portion of tourists are skirting the formal sector
● Unstructured data are overwhelming to collect and analyze
25

26. Solution
● A powerful machine that can crawl everything being posted
on the web about a destination
● A smart machine that can meaningfully code unstructured
data
● A local network of subject-matter experts that can augment
the machine’s destination and People-first intelligence
26

27. P1t Augmented Destination Intelligence
27
Public Websites
Crawled Data
Taxonomy
Web Crawler Infrastructure
Unstructured Text Analytics
Rule Set
Content and Context
Who? What? When? Where?
How Many? Why?
WebPortalInterface
TDA 1
TDA 2
...
TDA n

28. Augmented Destination
Intelligence (ADI)
Activity
“What information would make
your job easier? Could you
communicate this in the form
of a question?”
28

29. ADI – Voice of the Market
Questions:
Who are local insiders and their sentiment?
Who are digital influencers and their sentiment?
What are the destination’s hidden gems?

30. Commodity-based
Tourism Development
Local government and business
elites broker agreements with
tourism industry
Permatourism
Development
ADI guides Local government to
identify complimentary supply gaps
appropriate to microentrepreneurs
29

31. Commodity-based
Tourism Development
Local government and business elites
broker agreements with tourism
industry
Tourism tax revenues are used to
support infrastructure that supports
tourism industry
Permatourism
Development
ADI guides Local government to
identify complimentary supply gaps
appropriate to microentrepreneurs
Nurturing of microentrepreneurial
networks through inclusive policy,
networking events & market access
29

32. Commodity-based
Tourism Development
Local government and business
elites broker agreements with tourism
industry
Tourism tax revenues are used to
support infrastructure that supports
tourism industry
Most locals are not involved in
tourism and just tolerate it
Permatourism
Development
ADI guides Local government to
identify complimentary supply gaps
appropriate to microentrepreneurs
Nurturing of microentrepreneurial
networks through inclusive policy,
networking events & market access
Many locals are involved in tourism,
and most understand it & shape it
29

33. Commodity-based
Tourism Development
Local government and business
elites broker agreements with
tourism industry
Tourism tax revenues are used to
support infrastructure that supports
tourism industry
Most locals are not involved in
tourism and just tolerate it
Destination goes through predicted
TALC stages (Butler) at the mercy of
external actors
Permatourism
Development
ADI guides Local government to
identify complimentary supply gaps
appropriate to microentrepreneurs
Nurturing of microentrepreneurial
networks through inclusive policy,
networking events & market access
Many locals are involved in tourism,
and most understand it & shape it
Destination continually evolves to
balance competitiveness and
equitable/sustainable local benefits 29

34. Thank
You
Discussion