Understanding Tourist Guiding Entrepreneurship Through a Narrative Review and an Elite Participant Approach

ABSTRACT This article aims to introduce tourist entrepreneurship research, a conceptual framework that represents overall tourist guiding entrepreneurship and propose the importance of the constructs built in the framework in a cultural heritage context. For this purpose, a narrative review and elite participant approach were adopted. A total of 64 journal articles were examined to discuss major themes for this study. Based on data analysis, four significant themes were identified: success factors, motives, tourist guiding entrepreneurship type, and emerging themes. These themes were discussed and supported by previously published academic articles. The study outputs yield a unifying framework that illustrates tourist guiding entrepreneurship for the literature and aids professional or local managers to promote it for tourist guides. Tourism entrepreneurship is considered a multifaceted and over‐fragmented phenomenon by scholars. Despite the increased importance of tourism entrepreneurship, the conceptual and theoretical understanding of “tourist guiding entrepreneurship” has yet to be fully tapped.