Back of the Envelope: Small and Medium Tourism Enterprises' Approaches and Attitudes to Planning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Small and medium tourism enterprises (SMTEs) dominate New Zealand's tourism industry. They are important vehicles of economic development in rural areas and have a sizeable influence upon a tourist's experience. Literature has reported that SMTEs do not plan strategically, have an under-appreciation of planning and are disinclined to seek external planning assistance, despite planning being purported as a way that could help overcome their inherent difficulties. This points to a need to explore and understand the perceptions and approaches owner-managers have of planning. Based upon semi-structured interviews of owner-managers, this paper reveals that most operators are informal and ‘back of the envelope’ planners, with their experience allowing intuitive decisions instead. Considerable operational involvement results in a need for owner-managers to prioritize their time, and documenting plans is not considered necessary. Despite these findings, owner-managers reported that they value planning. This paper provides insight into the experiences of owner-managers from a peripheral, rural area of New Zealand and argues that business owners are indeed strategic planners, but are not recognized as such because they do not have the typical corporate or business strategies commonly prescribed in the management literature. Rather, they adopt unique lifestyle strategies such as the purposeful avoidance of business growth. Considering their informal planning methods, it is more pertinent to describe SMTEs as having ‘strategic intent’. The owner-managers' vision and intent are strategic, albeit unique, as they are driven by lifestyle motivations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".