Edinburgh Napier University

  This paper uses the ‘communication network’ perspective (Szarka 1990) to identify how small hospitality and tourism businesses in Pushkar, India, cope with a lack of support agency assistance in skills learning and knowledge transfer. The methodological process involves participant observation and in-depth interviews. The findings reveal the role of the employee and the visitor as primary influencers in the communication networks of the businesses. However, the visitor role has decreased since the early days of tourism, with employees being the main learning network for businesses, transferring knowledge throughout the destination by employment rotation and poaching. The paper calls for holistic small tourism business studies, which seek to understand the interconnectedness of network contributions within a locality.