Foreign Muslim Workers’ Perspectives of the Basic Needs of Muslim-Friendly Tourist Services: An Empirical Analysis of a Non-Muslim Destination

Abstract

The rapid growth of Halal travel offers a tourism opportunity for countries, but non-Muslim countries often find it difficult to meet the multiple religious needs of Muslim tourists. This study verifies Muslim tourists’ requirements for basic hotel and food services and identifies the categories in which to place these attributes and which ones need resources to increase Muslim tourists’ satisfaction. Applying Taiwan as a non-Muslim destination, we surveyed 216 Indonesian Muslim foreign workers and used the recently developed Gradient Boosting Decision Trees, instead of a regression method, to overcome the nonlinear and multicollinearity issues of Penalty-Reward-Contrast Analysis. Impact-Range Performance Analysis and Asymmetric Impact-Performance Analysis were then applied to examine the basic attributes of Muslim foreign workers’ tourist experiences. We learned that using Gradient Boosting Decision Trees provided advantages over the regression method. Empirical results indicated that hotel-related factors are prioritized over food services when Muslim tourists visit a non-Muslim country. In addition, religious observances play an essential part in Muslim tourists’ hotel choices, and conveniently accessible Halal food is a desirable travel requisite for this group.