Business planning processes in tourism family enterprises

Abstract

Despite the fact that business planning can stimulate growth of small or medium sized enterprises, there is still a lack of tourism research focussing on planning processes in family businesses. The following paper presents a survey on family businesses in the Austrian tourism industry and investigates their planning and strategy development behaviour. The findings demonstrate that business planning becomes a major instrument of success and growth control in tourism family business although only less than 30% of the entrepreneurs can be identified as high-professional planners. Interpretations of the results lead to several implications for the tourism industry stakeholders and tourism research. (original abstract)