People-First Tourism Lab Blog

        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 ...

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 ...