Halal tourism: Emerging opportunities

The main purpose of this paper is to raise awareness about the growing Halal tourism market segment and identify the fundamental needs of this segment. What is Halal tourism? What are the sources that inform about Halal tourism? What is the potential of Halal tourism? How does one attract this potential segment? These are some of the questions to which a response is provided in the paper. The methodology is largely reliant on secondary information. The paper also makes some recommendations which have implications for the practitioners.     

Halal tourism: travel motivators and customer retention

This research was designed to identify halal-friendly travel motivation factors and unearth their role in Muslim customer retention process in Korea. Qualitative and quantitative procedures were used to achieve research objectives. A comprehensive structural model was developed to distinguish the role of all proposed indicators. Our results revealed that halal-friendly travel motivations are significantly associated with customer return on investment and satisfaction, and that such relationships contribute to improving customer retention. The effectiveness of higher-order structure of halal-friendly travel motivations was demonstrated. The formation of Muslim customers’ post-purchase decisions was significantly moderated by the sense of belonging to a tourist destination.     

Halal tourism: Concepts,practises, challenges and future

Tourism recognizes the growing interest in Halal tourism from both the perspectives of industry and research. Halal tourism can be summarized by any object or action which is permissible to use or engage in tourism industry, according to Islamic teachings. Therefore, the success of developing and marketing Halal tourism destination must be guided by the adoption of Islamic teachings and principles in all aspects of tourism activities. This paper explores the concept of Halal tourism along with the components which constitute the industry. It provides worldwide examples of some of the current best practises. The opportunities and challenges in developing and marketing Halal tourism are also discussed.     

The impact of Halal tourism,customer engagement on satisfaction: moderating effect of religiosity

The research aimed at finding out the relationship between Halal tourism, religiosity, customer engagement, and tourist’s satisfaction. The population of the study were Muslim tourists who visited West Sumatra, Indonesia. The data were 450 respondents, but only 393 were useable responses. It is found that Halal tourism and customer engagement have significant impacts on the tourist’s satisfaction. Religiosity is a significant moderating variable on this relationship. Thus, this study gives some contribution to tourism sector especially on Halal tourism, religiosity, and customer satisfaction.     

Halal food,certification and halal tourism: Insights from Malaysia and Singapore

This paper discusses issues of halal food and its role in halal tourism with specific reference to Malaysia and Singapore which have majority and minority Muslim populations respectively. Sections devoted to the halal tourism market and the nature of halal food in general, incorporating matters of regulation, are followed by an account of conditions pertaining to halal food and certification in the two destinations. Attention given to the availability of halal food in tourism promotion of the countries is then considered, revealing a shared interest as well as some differences related to wider circumstances. Finally, directions for further research are suggested.     

人格特质理论视角下东南亚国家对中国旅游形象感知差异研究

国家旅游目的地性格是影响国家旅游形象和国际游客旅游决策的关键因素,对入境旅游市场营销具有指导意义。本文运用内容分析法、扎根理论研究法,对东南亚3个国家的中文主播网络视频、在华留学生及其亲属的访谈内容进行分析,以探究东南亚国家人们对中国旅游目的地性格维度感知强度和差异。研究表明：根据感知强度大小,东南亚国家对中国旅游目的地性格维度感知依次是能力、真诚、魅力、友善和侠义。东南亚国家对中国旅游目的地性格维度感知存在国别差异,其中,越南人和缅甸人的感知总体呈正面,感知维度分别是“友善”“魅力”和“侠义”“斯文”;老挝人感知相对负面,感知维度为“随性”“自我”。据此建议中国加强与东南亚国家的文化交流,区别不同国家人们的感知特点,进一步强化正面性格感知,调整和优化针对负面性格感知的宣传策略。     

Ageing,volunteering and tourism: An Asian perspective

As global populations age, there is need to deepen understanding about old people as both hosts and tourists. This paper draws on critical gerontology to examine the experiences of elderly volunteers at tourism sites in China. Through exploratory interviews with volunteers, we identify the importance of cultural context for understanding the experiences of old people as volunteers and hosts. We argue that Chinese philosophical traditions, combined with eastern collectivist values, shape old people's experiences of involvement in tourism volunteering. This study illustrates the value of critical gerontology for questioning the role tourism plays in both challenging and reinforcing normative ideas about ageing and being old, and the importance of cultural context for understanding elderly people's experiences of tourism.     

China''s domestic tourism: impetus, development and trends

The rapid development of China's domestic tourism in the 1990s is receiving more and more attention in China. The improvement of the national economy, the personality of Chinese culture, and the abundant tourism resources have all played roles in its growth. This article summarizes China's domestic tourism before 1990 and discusses the inherent reasons for its boom throughout the 1990s. It also forecasts development trends in the next decade, and identifies some important factors that constrain its growth.     

Entrepreneurship in the tourism industry: Issues in developing countries

The tourism industry in Malaysia is one of the most important sectors in terms of its contribution to the growth of the nation. The extensive demand on the tourism industry has stimulated the emergence of many small and medium hotels, resorts, and chalets in Malaysia. According to the literature, small and medium hotels are an extension of the entrepreneurial characteristics of the owners/managers of the hotels. In Malaysia, small and medium hotel entrepreneurs (SMHEs) have not been given much attention. Looking at this gap, this study aims to provide a significant result on entrepreneurship issues in Malaysia. The main objective of this study is to examine the characteristics of small and medium hotel owners/managers and the issues and problems they confront in relation to their survivability in the industry. The result revealed that the majority of owners/managers of small and medium hotels were male, middle-aged and older, with secondary and upper level of education, and whose prior specialisations or knowledge were not related to tourism. With strong self-confidence and independent personality characteristics, the majority started to establish their businesses after the financial crisis in 1997–1998. The result also defined small scale to mean hotels with less than 50 rooms, which had been constructed with limited personal funding and bank loans. Information technology was found to be an important tool to promote their hotels, but conventional techniques such as word of mouth and signboards were still significant. The owners/managers of small and medium hotels were in agreement over their weaknesses in terms of lack of knowledge and skills in running the business. At the same time, they also felt that the government should play a more proactive role in promoting the tourism industry.     

Current issues in tourism: Mitigating climate change in sustainable tourism research

This paper adopts a problematising review approach to examine the extent of mitigating climate change research in the sustainable tourism literature. As climate change has developed into an existential global environmental crisis and while tourism's emissions are still increasing, one would expect it to be at the heart of sustainable tourism research. However, from a corpus of 2573 journal articles featuring ‘sustainable tourism’ in their title, abstract, or keywords, only 6.5% covered climate change mitigation. Our critical content analysis of 35 of the most influential papers found that the current methods, scope and traditions of tourism research hamper effective and in-depth research into climate change. Transport, the greatest contributor to tourism's emissions, was mostly overlooked, and weak definitions of sustainability were common. Tight system boundaries, lack of common definitions and incomplete data within tourism studies appear to hamper assessing ways to mitigate tourism's contribution to climate change.     

Understanding small firms in tourism: A perspective on research trends and challenges

Although small firms in tourism have featured on the agendas of policy-makers for several decades, academic interest over the same period has fluctuated. Certainly the flurry of activity that occurred during the early 1990s became a steady flow of somewhat fragmented output rather than the ambitious and coherent programme of research that was anticipated at the time. The paper traces progress in this field by reviewing inter-, multi- and disciplinary studies that contribute to current understanding of small firms in tourism and how this understanding articulates with wider debates within tourism studies. In so doing, it challenges some conventional wisdom and provides an agenda for future research.     

Assessing macro environment trends in Singapore: Implications for tourism marketers

The growth in the number of Singaporeans traveling overseas has been quite remarkable. In 1994, Singaporeans made over 2.4 million overseas trips. This was made possible by the increased affluence of the population, after several decades of continued economic development. At the same time, there are changes in the demographic and psychographic composition of the population which attracted the attention of tourism marketers not only locally and abroad. This paper attempts to examine these changes and discuss their implications. Several types of new tours are suggested for a tourism industry that must innovate and upgrade their products and services to meet the demands of a new breed of consumers.     

Fuzzy Rasch model in TOPSIS: A new approach for generating fuzzy numbers to assess the competitiveness of the tourism industries in Asian countries

This study proposes a novel approach, the Fuzzy Rasch model, which combines Item Response Theory (IRT) and fuzzy set theory. This paper applies the Fuzzy Rasch model in Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to analyse the Tourism Destination Competitiveness (TDC) of nine Asian countries: China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and the Philippines. The study was conducted in 2009 using 6 criteria and 15 indices. The results demonstrate the feasibility of applying the Fuzzy Rasch model in TOPSIS to analyse TDC in Asian countries. In addition, the proposed model also provides an effective means of applying the MCDM method to study TDC. Furthermore, in 2009, the Asian countries were ranked from most to least competitive as follows: China, Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea and the Philippines.     

Government websites for promoting East Asian culinary tourism: A cross-national analysis

The content of government tourism websites is very important for promoting a tourist destination's exciting cuisine and food culture. These websites help to shape a country's, region's or locality's culinary-cultural image; they create a virtual experience for culinary tourists. This study explores the contents of the cuisine and gastronomy websites of Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand, analyzing the techniques used to introduce and promote these East Asian tourist destinations' cuisine and food culture. Specifically, the researchers examined the capacity of government websites to introduce and advertise traditional and local foods, restaurants, gastronomic tours, recipes and culinary cultures (including table manners and other dining customs). They also looked more generally at culinary tourism marketing strategies, including the use of restaurant guides and certifications.     

The modernities of heritage and tourism: interpretations of an Asian future

Recent years have seen the emergence of a number of regional-based charters and declarations; all of which attempt to address the Eurocentric biases of the global heritage movement. For example, the Nara Declaration, China Principles, Hoi An Protocols and Seoul Declaration all reflect a desire to develop heritage frameworks that are sensitive to, and in tune with, the complexities and socio-cultural specificities of the Asian region. With the primary concern of these initiatives being the development of more appropriate ‘conservation philosophies’ or notions of ‘authenticity’, they have given less attention to the interface between heritage sites and their consumers, or tourists, and the rapidly changing nature of tourism in Asia. Indeed, the vast majority of reports and studies produced by UNESCO, ICOMOS, IUCN and others continue to talk of ‘the tourist’ as a singular, homogenous construct. The rapid growth of travel for leisure and recreation within Asia today, however, demands a re-appraisal of how such terms are used and deployed within the heritage industry. Accordingly, this article examines why Asian tourism is presenting new and unfamiliar challenges for policy makers regarding the management and presentation of heritage sites in Asia. More specifically, it considers the industry familiar discourse of ‘site interpretation’ against a backdrop of Asian modernities in order to ask questions about aesthetics and the politics of heritage narration.     

The main paths of eTourism: trends of managing tourism through Internet

Drawing from the tourism and hospitality literature, this paper highlights the main research trajectories and themes in the context of eTourism. We use main path analysis to investigate the development trend of the synergistic relationship between innovative tourism applications and the new technologies. Further, the literature is classified into six groups through discovering the coherence structure in a citation network. The analyses show that research on websites, blogs, and social media on tourism is experiencing accelerated growth, which hints that there is a pendulum shift whereby the information and negotiation power asymmetry between the supply and demand sides are moving from provider-centric to consumer-centric. This study also elucidates the associated market disintermediation phenomenon and long tail effects on the distribution of destinations.     

Corporate governance,tourism growth and firm performance: Evidence from publicly listed tourism firms in five Middle Eastern countries

This study explores the under-researched relationship between corporate governance and firm performance in tourism companies. We employ instrumental variable modelling using 2SLS for publicly listed firms in five countries in the Middle East. Board independence is found to be positively related to firm performance and stock performance, suggesting that having independent directors among board members will improve overall firm performance. Board size shows opposing results: large boards enhance firm profitability; however, small boards exhibit more efficient stock performance. Finally, we support the tourism-led-growth hypothesis in our selected sample. These findings have empirical implications for policy makers, governments and academics.