Family Tourism businesses in Cuenca Crisis Entrepreneurship and Public Policies

This interdisplinary research in the field of tourism anthropology analyzes how family businesses contribute to the tourism industry in Cuenca. Our hypothesis argues that family businesses define, to a large extent, the hotel infrastructure and the city's tourist offer. This peculiarity, we affirm, explains the tourist oversupply while companies in the sector respond more to kinship structures than market logics. Along these lines, the relevance of the study is double. On the one hand, it makes a significant theoretical intervention in contemporary anthropological debates about capitalist forms informed by family values, needs and practices, specifically the way in which kinship relations give form and meaning to notions of property, entrepreneurship and heritage. On the other hand, it generates useful empirical supplies to design public tourism policies that consider the cultural and socio-economic composition of small and medium-sized basins. The research proposes three central questions: 1) What characteristics do the family businesses of the tourism sector present in Cuenca? 2) How do feelings and kinship ties manifest in the city's tourism companies? 3) How are family businesses related to tourism with patrimonial policies? To answer these questions we propose to make a census of family business business in the Historic Center of Cuenca and an ethnography that describes the business stories of families dedicated to the tourism business. We also propose to do file work on private assets that make up the Tourist Offer of Cuenca.

XVII UNIVERSITY COMPETITION FOR RESEARCH PROJECTS