Harmonizing Rural Tourism and Rural Communities in Malaysia

Lo, May-Chiun and Ramayah, T. and Wee, Alvin Yeo (2016) Harmonizing Rural Tourism and Rural Communities in Malaysia. Journal of Sustainable Development, 9 (4). pp. 27-43. ISSN 1913-9063

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Abstract

Malaysia rural tourism is composed of a large number of rural communities, each with distinct and varied assets. Within Malaysia, it is noticeable that tourism demand drivers play an important role in generating trips to rural tourism areas. Nonetheless, there are a number of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in rural tourism. Clearly, rural tourism marketing efforts need to leverage on the existing strengths and maximize the available opportunities. Hence, the purpose of this research is to investigate the impact of tourism on social, economics, environment and cultural from local communities perspectives in rural setting. 184 respondents comprising of local communities from 34 rural tourism sites in Malaysia took part voluntarily in this study. Twelve hypotheses comprising the dimensions of social, economics, environment and cultural on three components namely, positioning, communities’ value and destination environment were developed.To assess the developed model, SmartPLS 2.0 (M3) was applied based on path modelling and then bootstrapping with 200 re-samples was applied to generate the standard error of the estimate and t-values. Interestingly, the findings suggested that local communities were most concerned on the cultural and social impacts of tourism on their values, repositioning of the destination and environment. The present study provides lessons on the importance of continuing the efforts to understand the impact of rural tourism development from the local communities’ perspectives and to take into considerations views from the local communities in developing rural tourism destination.

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