Knowledge of risks and vulnerability, preparedness, the government support and homestay operators business resiliency / Ammar Abd Ghapar

In business general, resilience is the capability to quickly adapt and react to interferences as well as maintain the business operations to enable growth. Within the tourism related business, the concept of resilience is closely associated with the economy, socio-politic, cultural, and institutional or infrastructures as business in this industry is too fragmented and fragile and well depend on the tourists. Since homestay program is one of new tourism products and important contributors to' the rural area and community development and country revenue the understanding or knowledge on the risks and vulnerability either the internal and external and the preparedness among it operators toward their business resiliency is*"crucially important. Hence, this study empirically examines the effect of knowledge of risks and vulnerability on preparedness and the homestay business resiliency. In investigating this, a causal research design using the quantitative approach was used and the individual homestay community in all states in Malaysia who are currently registered with Tourism Malaysia under cluster homestay project is chosen as a sample of the study. Through a self-administered survey, 580 usable questionnaires were successfully collected. Various statistical analyses ranging from frequency, descriptive, inferential and the Partial Least Square (PLS- SEM) were used to answer the research questions and hypotheses. The analysis results provide evidence that there is a linkage between knowledge of risks and vulnerability attributes and homestay business resiliency or there is a causal relationship between operational, economy, social and culture risks and vulnerability and homestay business resiliency. In addition, knowledge of operational, social and culture risks and vulnerability is giving strong impact to homestay operators' preparedness while knowledge of economy risk and vulnerability although weak, also positively giving impact to the resiliency. This notion is further strengthened with the emergence of preparedness as mediator and the government support as moderator to the homestay business operation resiliency. To be more precise, in achieving resiliency in the homestay business operation besides knowledge of economy, operational, social and culture the element of preparedness is undeniably utmost important. In this sense, the strength of the relationship between knowledge of economy and social risk and vulnerability with preparedness is strongly increased with the presence of the government support. These optimistic indications from the practical aspects carry varying consequences and implications for the potential, the existing homestay operators, the individuals that closely associated with this kind of business operation and the relevant authorities.