This study presents a framework to empirically validate the relationship between the tangible and intangible measures on tourism destination marketing efforts. Uniquely, a case study was developed involving two different nature of tourism destinations (semirural and rural) and is incorporated into the framework to assess its moderating effect on the relationships among the predictors and destination marketing efforts. Two hundred and ninety-three usable responses were collected using a questionnaire survey. Partial least squares structural equation modelling was utilized to perform latent variable and multi-group analyses (MGA). The findings revealed that destination appeal was found to be the biggest concern among tourists visiting semirural and rural tourism destinations in Sarawak. For intangible components, both service quality and destination image were found to be significantly related to destination marketing efforts at a semirural tourism destination. Interestingly, for MGA results, it was worthwhile to learn that the relationship between service quality and destination marketing efforts happened to have a stronger impact on semirural than rural tourism destination. Hence, the proposed framework and research findings from this case study have provided significant insights that help various tourism stakeholders to better strategize and position semirural and rural tourism, particularly in the scenario of Sarawak, Malaysia. Future studies can examine this framework and test at other tourism destinations in Malaysia or in some other countries.

Practical Implications -From a practical point of view, the findings of the study provide valuable information to tourism stakeholders and policy planners about the importance of tri-dimensional tourism impacts as well as community knowledge and support in the development of rural tourism destination competitive advantage. In line with policy development or planning for rural tourismdevelopment, the tourism stakeholders should pay more concern on the tri-dimensional impacts, the importance of community knowledge about tourism, and gaining the community support for tourism development in order to achieve the goal of competitiveness. Originality/value -There is lack of study in investigating the development of rural tourism competitive advantage with a holistic framework. This paper studies the intended or unintended economic, socio-cultural and environmental impacts triggered by the tourism activities. This study has also investigated the local communities' knowledge and supports towards tourism as the community efforts determine the success of a destination management, especially in the rural area. Stakeholder involvement was also examined as the collaboration among relevant parties to create competitive advantage is essential to achieve sustainable rural tourism.

Purpose Following COVID-19, the emphasis on tourism development has shifted to rural tourism and eco-destinations for preventive practice of the three Cs – confined spaces, close contact and crowded spaces. Given the potential growth of rural tourism destinations, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is conceivably the first to provide empirical evidence for rural tourism development post-COVID-19, and this study aims to examine the relationship between the potential development of rural tourism destination competitiveness alongside the inherited, created and supporting resources as perceived by domestic tourists. Design/methodology/approach This study sampled 172 respondents who were all domestic tourists in Malaysia. A partial least square (PLS)-structural equation modeling approach was used to evaluate the developed model, with PLS estimation and hypothesis testing performed using WarpPLS software. Findings Interestingly, the findings indicate that rural tourism destinations in Sarawak derive competitive advantage from factors that are closely associated with urban destinations (i.e. created and supporting resources), whereas rural-related factors (i.e. inherited resources) are not perceived as a contributor to their competitive advantage. Practical implications The findings will assist tourism planners in constructing a deployable rural tourism destination competency index to develop policies and programmes that address specific tourism or rural development objectives in Malaysia and beyond. Originality/value The value of present study lies in its examination of the tourists’ perspectives on the factors that provides addition to rural competitive advantage, with an emphasis on a relatively new and contentious post-COVID-19 topic, namely, rural tourism destinations.

Contemporarily, tourism sector is a highly competitive environment, which forces tourism players to provide better visitor services in order to stay competitive. In rural tourism, a growing niche in the tourism market, multiple components of environmental constructs play a crucial role in contributing to the sustainability and competitiveness of rural tourism destinations. Hence, this study examines the impact of environment components on development of rural tourism destination competitiveness from a local community perspective. In addition, community support was adopted as moderator variable to examine the relationship among the constructs. 299 respondents comprising of residents of rural tourism in Sarawak, Malaysia took part voluntarily in this study. Data analysis was performed using SPSS Version 21.0 and Smart PLS 2.0 (M3) to assess the developed model, based on path modelling and then bootstrapping. Interestingly, the findings revealed that four of the environmental constructs have had a significant positive impact on destination competitiveness from local communities' perspective.

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