Over the past few decades, tourism has come to be considered a way of promoting economic and social development in peripheral, rural areas where traditional agriculture has declined. This is the case of the Portuguese region of Serra da Estrela, where rural tourism has been seen as a strategy for regional development. However, it is important to understand the extent to which tourism activities are able to meet the expectations of tourists and entrepreneurs, in order to represent a realistic development strategy. The current exploratory study compared the performance of 42 small tourism businesses operating in Serra da Estrela in an attempt to understand the impact of several factors on their success. Using occupancy rate as an indicator of success, a linear model was estimated, revealing the importance of adopting information and communications technologies (ICT) in tourism service as a factor for success. The study also shows that the supply of other services, besides housing, and client satisfaction promote the increase in net occupancy rates. Contrary to expectations, two of the explanatory variables related to management (owning and living in the touristic unit) have a negative impact on success.

Gathering information on the impact of tourism in territories is fundamental for the responsible management of tourism businesses and destinations. Therefore, it is important to monitor tourism performance using indicators that can assess its impacts. Monitoring tourism is a management technique that should adopt a stakeholder network perspective, i.e., all stakeholders should be involved and collaborate with each other by sharing information to increase the competitiveness of the destination. However, it is unclear whether stakeholders are aware of the importance of monitoring and whether monitoring considers their interests, which often leads to a lack of involvement. In this study, we adopt the stakeholder network perspective with tourism entrepreneurs from Centro de Portugal, where we aimed to evaluate the importance assigned to the monitoring of tourism and to the understanding of entrepreneurs’ information needs. To do so, the same survey was conducted twice, for the first time in 2018 and later repeated in 2022. The second survey sought to analyze whether tourism entrepreneurs’ perceptions changed after the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that tourism entrepreneurs valued the economic area more than the social and environmental ones in both periods. Nevertheless, from 2018 to 2022, entrepreneurs became more committed to monitoring tourism in Centro de Portugal.