Abstract

This paper seeks to explore the role of tourism entrepreneurship in producing destination tourism spirit in Nigeria. Nigeria is a land richly endowed with natural and cultural resources. Concerted attempts have been made in the past five decades to build a viable tourism industry by government and a small number of operators, but not much has been achieved. The country has not been able to harness the abundant resources into attractive tourist products with high visitor-drawing power. Many reasons have been given for this ugly situation. The paper therefore conceptualized that, the possession of a resource base can only give absolute advantage, but does not produce the desired level of industry spirit necessary to sell the destination. What matters most is the resource conversion rate of entrepreneurs. Nigeria does not currently have a tourism model capable of achieving 80% of tourism resource conversion rate. This paper therefore proposes a tourism sector development model that posits tourism entrepreneurship as the potential driver of the tourism industry. It also highlights specific entrepreneurial tourism operations that are necessary to optimize the country’s tourism goals. The proposed tourism destination development model (TDDM) has the following four components: invention of tourism entrepreneurial programmes, harnessing the potential of existing hospitality enterprises in creating a tourism value chain, promoting community based tourism (CBT) in tourism resource management and creating effective tourism regulatory framework and infrastructural base.

Key words: Tourism entrepreneurship, tourism development, tourism industry, tourism business plan, community based tourism, tourism development model.