Grèzes et al. (2015) Crowdfunded Tourism Activities, TTRA 2015 - 1/10 Crowdfunded Tourism Activities: Study on the Direct Impact of Swiss Crowdfunding Platforms on the Tourism Industry Vincent Grèzes 1 , Lionel Emery 1 , Roland Schegg 2 , Antoine Perruchoud 1 1 Entrepreneurship & Management Institute, 2 Tourism Institute University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland HES-SO Valais Wallis, Technopole 3, Sierre, 3960, Switzerland Tel. +4127 606 90 01, Fax. +4127 606 90 01 Emails: Vincent.Grezes@hevs.ch, Lionel.Emery@hevs.ch, Antoine.Perruchoud@hevs.ch, Roland.Schegg@hevs.ch 1. Introduction Based on the internet and the availability of the crowd through social networks, “crowdfunding” is the activity of crowd commitment used to fund a project by unknown individual people (De Buysere et al., 2012). Those individuals replace institutional and traditional business angels (Schwienbacher & Larralde, 2010) and crowdfunding was developed in the context of crowdsourcing activities defined as engaging people to solve a problem which would otherwise be resolved by internal resources (Howe, 2006). According to Hussain (2012), some benefits for companies of engaging the crowd consist in reducing marketing costs, accessing to a higher number of customers or in reducing production costs. Moreover, according to the author, crowdfunding represented 3.7% of the total amount of activities pursued in crowdsourcing platforms. There are different types of crowdfunding platforms based on donation, rewards, presales, investments or lending (De Buysere et al., 2012). In Switzerland, we identified 11 platforms dedicated to crowdfunding: Cashare, a donation-based platform, created in 2008, c-crowd and investiere created in 2010, Projektstarter and 100-Days created in 2011, WeMakeIt, Moboo and IBelieveInYou created in 2012, 7Crowd and Feinfunding created in 2013 and Sosense created in 2014. Six platforms are open to all kind of projects (100-days, 7Crowd, Cashare, Feinfunding, Moboo and ProjektStarter), three platforms are dedicated to specialized activities (IBelieveInYou dedicated to sport projects and WemakeIt dedicated to cultural projects and Sosense dedicated to social innovation), and two platforms are oriented to