Marketing sustainable tourism and its policies through community engagement- An Indian context

Tourism and hospitality industry creates opportunities for the states to improve cultural exchange, economic growth, self-employment, and quality of living. Sustainability of tourism has become a global challenge due to several factors such as environment's encumbrance and global health emergencies. To boost this industry, policies and schemes are implemented and marketed to support all scales of tourism-related businesses and engage local communities. This research outlines and explores these policies and their role in promoting tourism-driven self-employment of local communities through homestays in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in India. It studies the factors that enable or hinder the sustainability of these homestays. It explicates the challenges in the uptake of these policies in terms of inadequate promotion and complex requirements of registration, among others. We have used multi-method approach for the study. We deployed grounded theory to explore the factors, interpretive structural modeling to determine the relationships among the factors, and case study method to validate the findings. The results indicate that government support, environment's sustainability, region's holistic development, efficient hospitality and service, effective promotion strategies and community engagement are the driving factors for the sustainability of small-scale homestay businesses. The challenges entail region's under-development, limited technology adoption, unmet travelers' expectations, competition from the commercial properties, lower revenues, high overhead costs, and limited training opportunities for the entrepreneurs. The research has implications for the stakeholders and policy-makers as its findings suggest the areas of improvement in sustaining homestay like small-scale ventures for improving self-employment, arresting emigration and developing the region.