Barriers to tourism participation: A case of first‐generation local community service providers

Abstract Participation in tourism businesses for the local community often comes with various challenges. A better understanding of barriers to tourism development can help manage and smoothen community participation in tourism. Over the past two decades, an effort has been made to understand the barriers to tourism, but the perspective of first‐generation community participation is not explored in the existing literature. The current study measures barriers to tourism participation through four parameters, i.e., sociocultural, infrastructural, operational, and personal barriers. The study examined the barriers of first‐generation service providers from the rural tribal belt of Arunachal Pradesh, India. Data were collected using the purposive sampling technique from various tourism and allied services owned and managed by the local tribal community. The findings indicate that barriers related to the infrastructural support system are the dominant form of barriers. In contrast, the sociocultural factors do not act as a strong barrier among service providers. However, this report defers to other studies on tribal communities that indicate specific sociocultural barriers to participating in the tourism business. The study shows that willingness and conducive sociocultural aspects alone are not sufficient to lead a profitable tourism business. Furthermore, the study also recounts the importance of external intervention for macro‐level planning in tourism infrastructure.