Are Tourism Ventures Included in Business Accelerators Fulfilling Their Financial Expectations?

Ambitious, growth-oriented start-ups represent an important driver of change and transformation in the global economy, including the “particular” tourism sector. These firms induce the evolution of the tourism industry, by transitioning from offering standard hospitality services to providing unique experiences to visitors. The real advantages brought by entrepreneurial initiative refer to enhancing factors that lead to economic growth, innovation and progress, and separating from factors leading to failure or mere survival of a firm. Supportive measures such as start-up accelerators, incubators and/or business angels are designed to stimulate and encourage development of new ventures, achieving growth targets and, implicitly, ensuring economic growth, general and individual prosperity. In this paper, we took into account a sample of tourism and hospitality associated activities firms and analysed the existence of a correlation between profit margin goals and the potential benefits that are typically associated with entrepreneurial accelerators. To this end, we relied on the database made available by the Entrepreneurship Database Program (EDP). Our results suggest that high-performance goals are related with not only the importance of suitable financing, mentorship, network development or business skills, but also an unconvincing alignment between the perception of entrepreneurial success, the expectations of young entrepreneurs and the requirements of business accelerator programs.