Abstract
This chapter presents an in-depth look into a startup with the innovative idea of providing authentic travel experience by matching tourists with locals who are willing to share their native skills or traditional knowledge. With numerous offices offering services in cities across South and Southeast Asia, the online social enterprise has proven to be financially sustainable. Using the experience of this social venture as a case study, this chapter will analyze the challenges involved in redesigning a new service supply chain that creates novel value for customers and at the same time shifts a greater share of benefits generated from tourism to previously marginalized players.
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Notes
- 1.
By request of the startup founders, the name of the startup as well as those of the founders have been changed to maintain anonymity.
- 2.
According to the World Economic Forum (Rinne 2017), the sharing economy model focuses on the sharing of underutilized assets, monetized or not, in ways that improve efficiency, sustainability, and community. The underutilized asset in the case of Airbnb would be, for example, apartment rooms that are available for temporary rental. Uber is another example of a sharing economy applied to transport services (underutilized cars and drivers).
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Wongsurawat, W., Shrestha, V. (2018). Designing a Sustainable Tourism Supply Chain: A Case Study from Asia. In: Qudrat-Ullah, H. (eds) Innovative Solutions for Sustainable Supply Chains. Understanding Complex Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94322-0_10
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