The effect of digital community-based tourism platform to hosts’ livelihood

Abstract

In this paper, we present results of a contextual inquiry study in a Community-Based Tourism (CBT) village. We investigate the influence of an enabling digital service platform for tourism that rural Tanzanians utilise to attract and host guests. Our interviews and observations show that hosting tourists delivers positive short-term livelihood outcomes (income, visitors), but the long-term impact (social, infrastructure) to the communities requires deeper consideration. We recommend that sustainable digital service platforms for CBT should be developed and assessed including their features in addressing long-term impacts on livelihood. We propose the following topics for consideration in future development of digital CBT platforms: the role of surrounding communities, rewards to platform contributors, enabling of indirect economic activities, understanding conflict-of-interest between communities and platform, empowerment all of the users, and monitoring the local performance of the platform for its users.