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The purpose of this paper is to explore how GenAI can help companies achieve a higher level of hyper-segmentation and hyper-personalization in the tourism industry, as well as show the importance of this disruptive tool for tourism marketing.

This paper used the Web of Science and Google Scholar databases to provide updated studies and expert authors to explore GenAI in the tourism industry. Analysing hyper-segmentation and hyper-personalization modalities through GenAI and their new challenges for tourists, tourism cities and companies.

Findings reveal that GenAI technology exponentially improves consumers’ segmentation and personalization of products and services, allowing tourism cities and organizations to create tailored content in real-time. That is why the concept of hyper-segmentation is substantially focused on the customer (understood as a segment of one) and his or her preferences, needs, personal motivations and purchase antecedents, and it encourages companies to design tailored products and services with a high level of individual scalability and performance called hyper-personalization, never before seen in the tourism industry. Indeed, contextualizing the experience through GenAI is an important way to enhance personalization.

This paper also contributes to enhancing and bootstrapping the literature on GenAI in the tourism industry because it is a new field of study, and its functional operability is in an incubation stage. Moreover, this viewpoint can facilitate researchers and companies to successfully integrate GenAI into different tourism and travel activities without expecting utopian results. Recently, there have been no studies that tackle hyper-segmentation and hyper-personalization methodologies through GenAI in the tourism industry.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) offers a level playing field to all ethnic entrepreneurs (EE’s) operating from within it. The purpose of this qualitative research case study is to explore the reasons underpinning the relatively greater success that Indian-origin EE’s in the UAE have been enjoying for sustained periods – and across diverse industries – relative to their counterparts belonging to several other nations.

Qualitative research case study that draws from data gathered through 30 interviews of participants identified through expert sampling.

Whereas the UAE treats all its ethnic entrepreneurs (EE’s) alike and provides them with a level platform to operate from, the EE’s from India have consistently been outperforming those from all other nations, particularly within the context of the UAE’s large businesses spanning diverse industries. Three features seem to explain their success: their high tolerance for ambiguity; thriftiness; and intercultural competence.

Two key limitations were faced: firstly, the negligible research literature on ethnic entrepreneurship in the UAE, and related official statistics such as details (by ethnicity/nationality) of EE-owned businesses, and secondly, the industry-wise break down of such businesses and their performance, as available in other developed nations hosting EE’s. Resultantly, alternate sources of data have been used to complete this research.

Given the UAE’s national-level institutionalised efforts to promote entrepreneurship amongst its citizens and wider populace, there are many implications that this study holds for existing and future entrepreneurs.

While on the one hand, the UAE and the wider Gulf Cooperation Council region have been witnessing frenetic ethnic entrepreneurial activity in the past decade, the research literature on the regions’ ethnic entrepreneurship is extremely patchy. This case study serves to significantly bridge this gap, and to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first work, that extensively explores the entrepreneurial trajectory of Indian EE’s in the UAE, and the factors driving their success.