International Immigrant Entrepreneurship in Tourism Industry: A Comprehensive Literature Review

Abstract

Immigrant entrepreneurship is particularly important for tourism destinations that create innovative, ethnic and new-to-the-market tourism products and offerings since the international immigrant entrepreneurs’ culture, values, and traditions are novel to the country they operate in. Hence, the purpose of this study is to systematically examine the current literature on tourism immigrant entrepreneurship and present related study areas. The findings of the study revealed that there are only 102 articles in the literature related to immigrant entrepreneurship in the tourism industry, which highlights a gap in the literature. Most of the studies are concentrated in the general tourism field rather than specific sectors of the industry like travel or F&B. Methodologies of the articles show that most of the studies utilize qualitative research techniques, mainly comparative case studies and in-depth interviews. Number of quantitative studies is quite low and most of them are empirical. From a managerial point of view, the lack of studies in these areas is proof that there is a niche market for immigrant entrepreneurship in tourism sector, which can easily be filled by practitioners. Especially in countries such as Turkey, Italy and Greece, practitioners will significantly benefit from the findings of this study.