Description
The sustainable development of rural tourism is conditioned by the ability of entrepreneurs to act on opportunities and responsibly utilise local resources for tourism purposes, as well as by the involvement of the local community and key stakeholders. Visit Village is a novel business model for the organisation of small-scale tourism enterprises in cooperative structures to develop a more sustainable rural tourism industry. Coompanion Dalarna (a non-profit business advisory organisation) has had a project (2021-2023) that helped entrepreneurs from four villages to form the Visit Village economic association and a collaborative rural tourism platform. This research project is a case study of the Visit Village initiative. The first part of the research focuses on Coompanion’s project and investigates the notion of project formats as a framework for facilitating entrepreneurship and stakeholder interactions. The second part of this research project studies the Visit Village enterprise through its first year of operation to evaluate how the cooperative structure improves the conditions for rural tourism entrepreneurship.