The influence of domestic edu-tourists' perceived value, satisfaction and perceived risks on their behavioral intentions towards edu-tourism packages in Malaysia / Nornajiha Kamdi

The informal edu-tourism that comprises travels for the purpose of informal education and lifelong learning has become a well-developed trend that uses tourism as a tool to complement learning and accumulating experiences from practice. One of the ongoing efforts include the development of Malaysia 101 Edu-tourism Packages (M1EP), a niche platform hosted by several universities in the country. However, universities that consistently generate income from the edu-tourism packages continue to be dominated by only a few. The potential of informal edu-tourism and how domestic edu-tourists perceive the edu-tourism packages is overlooked. This study fills this void by investigating the relationships between perceived value, overall satisfaction and behavioural intentions, and by examining the moderating influence of perceived risk in the context of edu-tourism packages. Respondents were domestic edu-tourists who have experienced edu-tourism packages under M1EP. A total of 372 usable data were analysed using the Smart-PLS 3.0 and SPSS software. The results were consistent with those from previous studies showing that perceived value has a significant role in forming satisfaction and behavioural intention. The four significant values namely experiential value (universities/edu-tourist interaction, activity participation, culture and knowledge); functional value (establishment, service quality, the image and price); social value (social image, enhancement of social self-concept, and social interaction.); and epistemic value (knowledge and skill) were discovered to affect the domestic edu-tourist overall value perceptions towards the edu-tourism packages. This implies that managing and marketing these four value dimensions in edu-tourism packages is extremely critical towards favourable value creation. University organizers and marketers are recommended to take into account the order of importance of these value dimensions to better develop positioning strategies and to successfully promote this particular type of tourism. The result also shows strong support for the hypothesis that perceived risk moderate the relationship between satisfaction and behavioural intention, and the effect is more pronounced in the perceived low risk packages.