People-First Tourism Lab Blog

The longitudinal comparison of the previous year’s website visitation performance with the most recent quarterly report provides a snapshot of the overall reach of the project, as well the performance of the most visited micro-entrepreneurs. Additionally, the report includes data about the reach of the project’s scholarship to the general public through select social media tools – e.g., this web blog. Some significant changes in offer and marketing are tracked and have shaped the changes in the performance of the website. Here is the most recent report, P1T Dashboard Analytics Report for 3rdQuarter of 2016 (see inset below). The report for the 4th Quarter 2016 will be appearing in a January posting on this blog. . This report revealed that new visitation to the new www.peoplefirsttourism.com web marketplace has continued to significantly decrease over the new visits for 2015 3 rd Quarter (-26%). The returned visitors to the site have also decreased (-17%). Visitation t

        Jimmy is a driver for Raleigh Rickshaw. Since he moved down from Washington D.C., he has enjoyed making a living from working a couple days a week at Raleigh Rickshaw and interacting with tourists and locals. While living in Washington D.C., Jimmy worked in other areas of the service and tourism industry, he has a background of working at restaurants and bars as a server and barista. As the years went on he looked to move to a less crowded city and closer to the coast. When he got to North Carolina he thought he would be going to Wilmington, he ended up liking Raleigh and the downtown area. Jimmy moved recently to Raleigh, at the beginning of summer 2016. He waited a couple of months for the temperatures to go down before he started working at Raleigh Rickshaw.  I grew up in Virginia and then went to live in Washington D.C. living in the suburbs until I moved with a roommate into the city.  I lived in the city for the past fifteen years, ten of which I lived in

Tourism is a major economic force in many regions, generating employment, public tax, and foreign exchange, but some researchers insist that local ownership is the most meaningful way to engage local communities in the industry. Until recently, access to tourists depended on formal distribution systems, but webmarketplaces such as People-First Tourism , Etsy , Airbnb , Uber , and Local Harvest now allow microentrepreneurs to showcase products and services to large markets, and more importantly reach customers directly. Despite its ubiquity and millions of adopters around the world, the emerging sharing economy has largely failed to engage under-resourced rural tourism microentrepreneurs in meaningful economic activity, potentially increasing existing socio-economic disparities. In order to understand the rural tourism microentrepreneur’s involvement with e-commerce, I explored the construct of Tourism e-Microentrepreneurial Self-Efficacy (TeMSE), defined as one’s belief in