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This paper aims to investigate the economic impacts of the current coronavirus disease, which is globally known as (COVID-19) pandemic, on small businesses in the tourism and hospitality industry, including food and beverages (F&B) industries in Malaysia during and after the enforcement of the Movement Control Order (MCO) and conditional (CMCO) with the emergence of new business models.

In this paper, the implemented methodology involved a secondary qualitative research design based mainly on the existing literature, the World Health Organisation (WHO) reports, the government’s documents, in addition to online sources and observations regarding local business experiences.

The findings revealed that implementing effective strategies of recovery, shaping resilience solutions and supporting policies such as the National Recovery Plan, which is backed by the government played a pivotal role in avoiding the turndown of small businesses.

This critical review is submitted as an original research paper, which aims to provide important perspectives regarding the COVID-19 pandemic impacts on the tourism and hospitality industry in Malaysia. This paper serves as a scholarly platform for further in-depth studies on various resilience solutions of small businesses.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the relevance of business intelligence (BI) in businesses in general and tourism firms in particular. BI has been hailed as an innovation that can propel businesses that adopt the system to high productivity and efficiency. This paper confirms that view but further adds that BI also enhances a business’s competitiveness.

This paper reviews literature on the use of BI in tourism. Although current literature is largely fragmented, focusing on BI, the tourism industry and the notion of competitiveness separately, this paper makes an attempt to bring the three sub-themes in the same study and highlights their interconnectedness. The study adopts two environmental analysis models to better analyze this matter. First is the environmental analysis model as based on Downes’s modification of Porter’s five forces framework. The second model used is the resource-based view approach to business environmental analysis.

This paper affirms that the tourism industry is one of those industries that continue to benefit from the advantages that come with the adoption of a BI system. Literature shows that the tourism industry was one of those that first adopted BI in order to benefit from the benefits that come with its adoption. Such advantages include flexible and user friendly tourists’ data capture, storage, retrieval, processing and analytical capabilities.

This was a largely literature review-based study. There is, therefore, room for strengthening its findings by conducting field work and mixed methods research for more robust results.

This study will surely benefit the tourism industry and business in general from its highly favorable conclusions to the benefits that come with the adoption of a BI system. It can also be used as a reference in to the tourism field, especially aggregating important concepts and literature that can help future practical studies.

Society will also benefit from this study in terms of the new knowledge that has been generated. Members of society will then be in a position to demand products and services that are a result of innovation and informed decision making.

Although this paper is largely based on literature, the conclusions reached are those of the authors. A close assessment of the literature in BI and the tourism industry was done, resulting in the conclusions reached by the authors.

Smart tourism (ST) needs the development of smart business. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the future of the smart component of tourism companies, what their perspectives are and what factors can help to accelerate it.

A survey of 133 managers of tourist companies is the basis of the empirical information. The study was a personal survey carried out during FITUR 2019 International Tourism Fair of Madrid. The main element of the study is the future development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and smart tourism (ST) in business.

The results indicate that there is little development at present of the smart business eco-system and that development will continue to be slow in the future. Moreover, this is not a critical issue in the agendas of companies. It was found that tourists pressure tourism through the extensive use of their smartphones, but only at the level of tourism resources. Furthermore, it will be the consolidation of the smart tourism destination that marks the medium and long-term design of smart business.

The limitations concern the problems of a sampling procedure. Firstly, it operates with a database of managers’ opinions; secondly, there are specificities of each company in particular.

The design of the smart tourism destination must incorporate the integration of tourism companies, both with a useful vision of ICTs towards the creation of experiences.

Research on smart business tourism is very scarce compared to smart destination and smart tourists. Also, the data are supported by managers of important tourism companies, as their companies are present at FITUR.

This study aims to systematize the drivers of nascent entrepreneurship in tourism and to suggest avenues for future research. As a consequence of the pandemic, a reduction in early-stage entrepreneurial activity was reported worldwide. The countries that responded best to this situation were those that fostered entrepreneurship at this early stage, designated as nascent. Hence, research on nascent entrepreneurs requires particular attention.

To address this study’s goal, the authors have examined the development of nascent entrepreneur literature in the last two decades and discussed how the literature on tourism nascent entrepreneurship relates to the mainstream literature in terms of theoretical frameworks. The authors explored specificities of the tourism industry to propose new research avenues to explore the theme of new venture creation in the hospitality and tourism sector.

The authors divided the implication of tourism specificities into main themes: motivations, human and social capital and government and incubators. Several research questions for future research are proposed.

By focusing on nascent entrepreneurship, researchers and policymakers can obtain important insights from projects that have not been implemented, going beyond those that have been successfully undertaken, as aimed at in entrepreneurship research.

This research contributes to the nascent tourism entrepreneurship literature by providing theoretical and empirical research questions to advance existing knowledge in tourism nascent entrepreneurship.

The starting premise of this study is that women's empowerment is the goal for self-realization and that the support that comes from local tourism stakeholders represents an adequate base. In many rural areas, women have established self-help groups (SHGs), which facilitate the interaction with a wide range of stakeholders. The objective of this paper is to investigate the effects of SHGs on female entrepreneurship and self-employment in tourism.

To examine the research question, this study adopted a quantitative research that included a sample of 513 women in a less-advanced rural area in Serbia. For the data analysis, the generalized linear regression model (GLM) was used.

According to the results, self-employment is the leading goal of women's empowerment.

The main limitation in the research and the authors’ suggestion for future research is to increase the sample size of female respondents, so examination of their attitudes and role in the travel business in their local settings might reach higher significance. The second issue that the authors would like to point out is a highly local character of our study, so the future research should involve other rural areas in the country and from abroad (e.g. similar undeveloped countryside with noticeable, active women's role in local entrepreneurship).

The most important practical implications of this paper are twofold: (1) the results of the research have shown that the tourist potential of rural areas can be enhanced through local tourism stakeholders' support; (2) women without professional interest or jobs in rural areas, especially in the areas where the population is traditionally dominated by men (husband/brother/father), have a chance to earn and to be economically more independent. This research can affect future studies to investigate other aspects of empowerment depending on the difference of regions, from one side, and also alternative opportunities for tourism and local development in less-advanced rural areas, from another side.

The study analyzes the tourism potential of the rural areas (which are less advanced and mostly very poor in developing countries, such as Serbia). In this case, there are opportunities to increase employment, social inclusion of women, development of new tourism strategies, implementation of destination marketing, etc. Moreover, it contributes to future research in the field of stakeholders in tourism strategies.

This research aims to demonstrate how the circular economy is employed to drive the sustainability of the tourism industry in Krabi, Thailand, through the concept of mindful consumption and service-dominant logic (hereafter S-D logic).

A seven-year longitudinal study (2013–2020) was conducted through four studies from different perspectives, including macro, meso and micro levels of development in Krabi province.

Krabi tourism stakeholders have collaborated to co-create green culture and behavior whereby the value network among stakeholders plays an important role in driving the circular economy in practice.

This study provides an understanding of how the circular economy society has been co-created. However, further research should be conducted in other tourism cities by focusing on the key success factors that drive the circular economy.

The longitudinal study with multi-perspective micro, macro and meso levels of development in this study has shed the light on how the circular economy (CE) policy can be turned into practice.

Discussions on tourism development address the urgent need to reduce the negative impacts of tourism on tourist destinations. Despite decades of trying to find potential ways to foster sustainability, however, current tourism development is still mainly driven by political interests and growth agendas. In spite of concepts intending to improve sustainable tourism development, negative dynamics, such as over-tourism and the exploitation of nature and local communities, dominate the current reality of tourism. This article focuses on the concept of degrowth as a potential solution for rethinking tourism policy and practices to ensure greater sustainability. Its aim is to explore the gap between these policies and the academic theories on instigating sustainable change, and the actual reality of the tourism industry, which is primarily driven by economic motivations such as growth.

To explore this dichotomy, this paper investigates the values of tourism lifestyle entrepreneurs. Small businesses are the most dominant group in the industry in terms of numbers. I contend that researching their viewpoint on current developmental trends could lead to valuable insights into how to tackle this gap between theory and reality. This paper also explores how the degrowth paradigm may promote sustainability in tourism, as well as the potential role that tourism lifestyle entrepreneurs could play in this development. The discussion is illustrated by a case study based on interviews with tourism entrepreneurs in Iceland.

The findings indicate that various tourism stakeholders have different approaches to growth, with many tourism lifestyle entrepreneurs tending to embrace degrowth practices by acting according to their value base, albeit sometimes unconsciously. This focus on aspects other than growth could potentially encourage tourism lifestyle entrepreneurs to contribute to sustainable development.

The examples discussed in this paper are locally limited and cannot be generalized due to the small size of the interviewed sample group. The scalability of individual entrepreneurs’ impact is limited due to their small size.

The actions and values applied by these tourism lifestyle entrepreneurs demonstrate how degrowth can be manifest on a small scale: growth is only embraced up to a certain limit, so it oes not exceed social and environmental capacities; from that point on, community well-being plays the key role. This study demonstrates the untapped knowledge tourism lifestyle entrepreneurs could provide to rethinking the tourism industry.

This study demonstrates the importance of shedding more light on ethical issues and values beyond growth in both academic and political discussions. Addressing tourism lifestyle entrepreneurs as smaller-scale actors of tourism degrowth could be a meaningful starting point for holistically rethinking tourism and give them a voice.

This research emphasizes untapped knowledge by acknowledging entrepreneurs and their potential for rethinking tourism development, concluding with recommendations for practice and policy.

Digitalization had a relevant impact on the cultural tourism sector, both demand and supply. If, on the one hand, advances in digital technologies provided tourists with new mobile services able to amplify the cultural experience, on the other hand, they catalyzed the development of new business models by digital enterprises. This paper has a twofold purpose: to detect business models and key characteristics of mobile apps for cultural tourism and to analyze the offering of app-based services in this sector.

The authors defined a methodology to identify, characterize and analyze a particular category of digital products for cultural tourism: app-based services. They are studied in terms of value creation, proposition and capture with the aim to identify the distinctive features of business models. As a result, the authors identified a classification framework on three main dimensions, namely “how to exploit mobile app features to create value for cultural tourists” (value creation), “which valuable services are delivered to cultural tourists” (value proposition) and “how companies are rewarded for the value they offered” (value capture). The authors apply the framework to perform a situation analysis of app-based services in the cultural tourism market.

The analysis highlights that digital enterprises offering app-based services do not fully exploit advances in technologies about users' value requirements. Hence, the results of our work suggest some directions that digital enterprises may follow to better exploit mobile app technology.

To date, little research has been devoted to investigating cultural tourism business models involving the exploitation of mobile app-based services. This research provides a useful framework to analyze fundamental aspects of business models in this sector. Such a framework represents a practical tool that provides fruitful insights for the design of a new generation of app-based services within the so-called “Internet of things” domain.

The vulnerability of the tourism industry to an array of risks, encompassing family-related, small- and medium-sized enterprise-specific, strategic, tourism-specific and external factors, highlights the landscape within which small and medium family enterprises (SMFEs) operate. Although SMFEs are an important stakeholder in the dynamic tourism sector, they are not one homogenous group of firms, but have different strategic orientations. This study aims to investigate the interplay between strategic orientation and risk perception to better understand SMFEs risk perception as it is impacting their decision-making processes, resilience and long-term survival. The authors investigate how different strategic orientations contribute to different perspectives on risk among owner-managers.

Based on a qualitative data corpus of 119 face-to-face interviews, the authors apply various coding rounds to better understand the relationship between strategic orientations and the perceptions of risks. Firstly, the authors analysed the owner–manager interviews and identified three groups of different strategic orientations: proactive and sustainability-oriented SMFE, destination-affirmative and resilience-oriented SMFE and passive SMFE. Secondly, the authors coded the interviews for different risks identified. The authors identified that the three groups show differences in the risk perceptions.

The data unveil that the three groups of SMFEs have several differences in how they perceive risks. Proactive and sustainability-oriented SMFEs prioritize business risks, demonstrating a penchant for innovation and sustainability. Destination-affirmative and resilience-oriented SMFEs perceive a broader range of risks, tying their investments to destination development, emphasizing family and health risks and navigating competitive pressures. Passive SMFEs, primarily concerned with external risks, exhibit limited awareness of internal and strategic risks, resist change and often defer decision-making to successors. The findings underscore how different strategic orientations influence risk perceptions and decision-making processes within SMFEs in the tourism industry.

The authors contribute to existing knowledge include offering a comprehensive status quo of perceived risks for different strategic orientations, a notably underexplored area. In addition, the differences with respect to risk perception shown in the paper suggest that simplified models ignoring risk perception may be insufficient for policy recommendations and for understanding the dynamics of the tourism sector. For future research, the authors propose to focus on exploring the possible directions in which strategic orientation and risk perception influence one another, which might be a limitation of this study due to its qualitative nature.

Varying strategic orientations and risk perceptions highlight the diversity within the stakeholder group of SMFE. Recognizing differences allows for more targeted interventions that address the unique concerns and opportunities of each group and can thus improve the firm’s resilience (Memili et al., 2023) and therefore leading to sustainability destinations development. The authors suggest practical support for destination management organizations and regional policymakers, aimed especially at enhancing the risk management of passive SMFEs. Proactive SMFE could be encouraged to perceive more family risks.

Viewing tourism destinations as a complex stakeholder network, unveiling distinct risk landscapes for various strategic orientations of one stakeholder has the potential to benefit the overall destination development. The proactive and sustainability-oriented SMFEs are highly pertinent as they might lead destinations to further development and create competitive advantage through innovative business models. Passive SMFEs might hinder the further development of the destination, e.g. through missing innovation efforts or succession.

Although different studies explore business risks (Forgacs and Dimanche, 2016), risks from climate change (Demiroglu et al., 2019), natural disasters (Zhang et al., 2023) or shocks such as COVID-19 (Teeroovengadum et al., 2021), this study shows that it does not imply that SMFE as active stakeholder perceive such risk. Rather, different strategic orientations are in relation to perceiving risks differently. The authors therefore open up an interesting new field for further studies, as risk perception influences the decision-making of tourism actors, and therefore resilience.