Rural Tourism Destination Performance in East Malaysia: Influencing Factors from the Communities’ Perspective

Abstract

Rural tourism is a rapidly growing tourism segment and has been given increasing importance, in view of its potential to contribute economic growth to the rural areas. However, any rural tourism destination development should be implemented in a way that maximises destination performance. In our study, we examine the relationship between support and participation of the local government, community leadership in tourism, community attitudes towards tourism, and community support towards tourism with destination performance (from the economic, socio-cultural and environmental aspects), from the local community perspective. We obtained, as voluntary respondents, 176 residents of a local community at a rural tourism destination in Sabah, Malaysia. SmartPLS 2.0 (M3) was applied to assess the developed model. Thereafter, to generate the standard error of the estimate and t-values, bootstrapping with 200 re-samples was applied. The findings suggested that community attitudes and community leadership in tourism have a significant positive impact on destination performance, whereas local government participation and support, and community support for tourism, had little impact on the same. Implications of these findings were further discussed.

Influencing Factors and Mechanism of Urban Community Tourism Development: A Case Study of Beijing

“…The impact of community participation was small, which was one of the differences between urban and rural tourism communities. Previous studies in rural community tourism have shown that residents' attitudes and community leadership had a significant positive impact, while government's support had little impact [37]. However, our results showed that residents' willingness to participate and government's policy support were slightly less important than community managers' willingness to support.…”

“…Residents' willingness to participate Cheuk et al [37] Community managers' willingness to support Government's policy support Table 2. Explanation of indicators.…”

Analysis and Optimization of Landscape Preference Characteristics of Rural Public Space Based on Eye-Tracking Technology: The Case of Huangshandian Village, China

“…The aborigine group more easily searched for information on the landscape in the square space and street space than the tourists, which is because these two types of spaces are their daily life spaces and they are familiar with their landscapes [90]. The landscape elements in the street space, such as the gables of the buildings and changing landscape walls, were more likely to attract the subject's attention.…”

The Role of Community Leadership in the Development of Grassroots Innovations

“…Community leadership has been studied in a range of subject areas, for examples in education (e.g. Bukoski et al, 2015;Riley, 2012), health (Trapence et al, 2012), local government (Sullivan, 2007), local politics (Bénit-Gbaffou and Katsaura, 2014) and tourism (Cheuk et al, 2015).…”