Youth Entrepreneurship in Tourism and Hospitality

As a sociological human force, youth can operate tourism in multiple levels and ways. Young entrepreneurs may be one of the solutions for sustainable development in the destination. But the opportunities for the youth need to be identified. The ability and opportunity of youth creates the tourism entrepreneur. In this chapter, reasons, causes, and motivations of young tourism entrepreneurs in Bangladesh were explored. Perception study of the youth allows to understand the opportunity of this field. Their brand new perception on tourism helps to conceive the exposition of tourism as a new meaning. The results express the intrinsic motivation that compromises the personal thoughts and perceptions of the youth. Some barriers prohibit the youth to becoming tourism entrepreneurs. Among those, the major barriers are lack of their business operation and management, limited access to financial support, shortage of tourism products and poor skills, knowledge about risk management, etc. Furthermore, the respondents (n = 35) stated their common job seeking attitude and ignorance of entrepreneurship. Knowledge about socio-economic and cultural areas and tourism in details is still unknown to the youth. Integrated resource management is also unknown to them. So, the scope and opportunity of youth entrepreneurship in tourism is not widely accepted, rather a quite new field. But they have enough interest to grasp the matter as an adventure. These findings may be used for tourism stakeholders, local community, and policy makers for the youth and social leaders to form a development plan.