Rural tourism: support for destination competitiveness strategies from communitys’ perspective / Rozalina Abdul Razak

Nowadays, tourism industry becomes one of the profitable industries, which contribute to
the growth of the country economy. Due to that factor, Malaysia can be considered as
providential country by having unique tourism attractions that can be transformed into
tourism production, which some of them are from rural tourism industry. Therefore, it is
important to fully utilized rural tourism resources in order to create rural tourism product
that have competitive edge. However, there are many factors need to be considered when
embark in rural tourism sector. The most important thing to be considered is the support
from the local community itself. This is because without the support and commitment
from local community, all the planning and strategies cannot be succeeded. Therefore, the
research proposes is to look at the support of destination competitiveness strategies
among rural community in Perlis. Considering the community as the central to this
process, they should be involved and affected by rural tourism. In order to do that, the
entire development plan should benefit the community. A simple random sampling had
been used which involves 182 respondents from rural community in Perlis. By using self
reported questionnaires, survey had been done from one house to another by the
researcher. The outcome of the research supports the hypotheses made and the findings
also answered the research questions outlined in the proposed research. It is a great hope
that the proposed research can be undertaken in order to benefit policy makers, educators,
and tourism authorities, on the planning and developing destination competitiveness
strategies by considering community’s perspective.