People-First Tourism Lab Blog

  A few years ago, I did a pilgrimage on the Camino Frances with my father and was intrigued with some of what I observed regarding endogenous microentrepreneurial development as well as commercial development that appeared to be poaching economic benefits from rural communities along the camino.   For example, we stayed in a hostel in a small village in which our host had left Madrid’s stressful life, and moved back to his family’s pueblo to restore and live in his family’s farm house running it as a hostel for pilgrims.   Conversely, we stayed in hostels operated in houses rented by large national companies and staffed by young workers that left for the nearest city after feeding early dinners to their guests. The Camino de Santiago is a fascinating tourism and socio-cultural phenomenon; and I have been interacting with several colleagues who conduct research about various details within this complex system.   There is a growing body of literature on this topic...

Some of my colleagues from Northern Portugal and Spain's Galicia province invited me to join a protest against plans to build a paper mill next to a very pristine river.  I plan to participate because I love free and clean rivers; and because I am suspect of the long-term local benefits of large industrial projects in peripheral rural areas.   So, I thought this might be a good theme to explore in my ongoing "chats with AI." Duarte: Please explain why industries like paper mills constrain the development of rural tourism microentrepreneurship; and why rural tourism microentrepreneurship might be a better strategy for the economic and socio-cultural vitality of rural communities. Chat GPT: Certainly! Let's break this down into two parts: first, why dirty industries like paper mills constrain the development of rural tourism microentrepreneurship, and second, why rural tourism microentrepreneurship is a better strategy for the economic and socio-cultural vitality of ru...

  The use of AI to help develop academic thinking and writing is receiving growing attention.   I have been exploring ways to involve students in class with querying AI applications on topics underlying P1tLab scholarship, and in the process, I found this resource proposing prompts that optimize the usefulness of ChatGPT for academic writing and thinking.   As I experimented with the prompts recommended in that publication, I arrived at the example below.   I thought I’d share it here because I found the answer relatively consistent with my own understanding of the body of scholarly knowledge on the topic.  Duarte: “Analyze the impact of [tourism microentrepreneurship] on [destination competitiveness]: Investigate and analyze the impact of [tourism microentrepreneurship] on [equitable economic development in destinations]. Explore relevant studies, data, and theories to understand how this factor influences the subject matter and contributes to existin...