Ways of Knowing
Analysis of Tourism Sustainability Programs in Latin America And Spain
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Daniel Celis Sosa, Sergio Moreno Gil, Carmelo J. León
The map, or complete inventory, of tourism degrees in higher education, is 2,380 programs: 1,517 are undergraduate and 863 are postgraduate. 906 academic institutions of Latin America and Spain that offer such degrees, with 71% by private (643) institutions, suggesting important repercussions that will be discussed in this presentation. In addition, the talk will address the degree to which these programs have a focus on sustainability. Currently, there are 32 Degree Programs in tourism and sustainability, followed by 46 Postgraduate Programs in tourism and sustainability in academic institutions of Latin America and Spain. In undergraduate studies, sustainability is placed in the 6th position. In terms of tourism graduate programs and sustainability, it can be seen that Spain leads with 18 programs, followed by Brazil (8), Mexico (5), Costa Rica (5), Argentina (5) and other countries with a single program, such as Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, and Uruguay. The public offer of these graduate programs reaches the 24 programs, while the private one is 22 programs. On the other hand, the Postgraduate Programs that relate tourism and culture are 52 in total, of which 36 belong to public academic institutions and 16 are taught in private academic institutions. Most postgraduate courses in Tourism and Culture are taught in Spain (45).
Immigrant Entrepreneurs’ Knowledge Sources and Origin in New Restaurants of the Tourism Industry
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Pedro Calero Lemes, Desiderio J. García-Almeida
Immigrants are attracted to tourism destinations due to staffing problems in the local human resource markets and migration flows to regions with higher quality of life. Many of those immigrants make the decision of starting a new venture in the destination, since they identify an opportunity there or are forced out of the labour market with entrepreneurship being the only option left in the host country. These migrant entrepreneurs need knowledge to manage the new firm successfully. The knowledge these entrepreneurs require is obtained from several sources and places. More specifically, education, work experience, networks, both in the home and in the host country, as well as local institutions and Internet and written material are all knowledge sources where immigrants can learn and construct their knowledge from in order to set up their new ventures. This study attempts to analyse the immigrant entrepreneurs’ knowledge sources and origins they have used to create their new ventures in the restaurant sector in a tourism context. The data for the empirical analysis were obtained from a survey to immigrant entrepreneurs who have created new restaurants in the tourism sector of Gran Canaria, Fuerteventura and Lanzarote (Canary Islands, Spain). With data from 108 immigrant entrepreneurs, interesting results are obtained. Thus, the knowledge sources and origins are described, the existence of differences in knowledge sources by origin are explored, and groups of entrepreneurs based on their knowledge are identified and analysed.
How Representative Are User Generated Reviews: A Case Study from the Activities and Attractions Sector
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Edu William, Jacques Bulchand Gidumal
Nowadays, user-generated content (UGC) has become one of the main sources of information about products and services for consumers. Due to the intangibility of services offered in the travel sector, the tourism industry has been one of the ones in which UGC has become more popular. There are some success stories of websites specifically targeted to gathering UGC, such as TripAdvisor. It is also common to find UGC in the sites in which users book services, e.g. Booking.com. However, an issue that has remained largely unsolved in the literature is that of how representative these reviews are, since it is well know that not every user is going to post a review. Who are the ones that review their experience? Is it only those that had a very good or a very bad experience? Are there differences between nationalities? And between types of services? Are those who book a long time in advance more prone to reviewing that last-minute bookers? In this research-in-progress we try to answer most of the above stated questions, by analyzing a dataset of more than 1,500 sales and more that 150 review. This data set belongs to all the bookings and reviews received by a travel distribution group in the course of one year. This group is in charge of the online representation of a large amount of activity providers. These activities are then sold in different online platforms. Our main research questions are focused on analyzing these reviews in order to understand their representativeness.
