A Study on the Experience of Rural Tourism Entrepreneurs’Competitiveness during the COVID-19 Outbreak: APhenomenological Study

Tourism is one of the major industries affected badly by the COVID-19outbreak which influenced its entrepreneurs. Therefore, this study aims to uncover the experience of rural tourism entrepreneurs on sustaining their competitiveness during the outbreak. This research was conducted with a qualitative method by using a phenomenological approach. The data was collected by conducting in-depth semi-structured interviews with owners and managers in rural hotels located in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. The analysis of data used the generic strategy including the coding, sorting and synthesizing. As per the findings, rural entrepreneurs are encountering numerous challenges during the pandemic and they tend to be existed for a longer period of time. The challenges were themed as current struggles due to pandemic and prospective hazards of tourism. The current struggles are consisted of three categories namely hardships in internal operations, external barriers for advancement and inadequacy of motivation. The theme of prospective hazards of tourism was generated from the categories of threat for wellbeing of hotels and possibility of unfavorable occurrences. Despite these challenges, the optimistic rural entrepreneurs are putting their efforts to achieve competitive advantage and trying to deal with difficulties to sustain the continuity of their hotels. Hence, this study uncovered the gravity of issues encountered by rural entrepreneurs which are absent in aggregate numbers of macro level studies and these issues are also relevant to their total entrepreneurial network.However, their passionate nature in crafting creative strategies to deal with these issues is noteworthy.