Abstract
One of the important issues for sustainable island tourism is knowledge about the needs of the host and tourist. As tourism is now becoming a global issue, there is also a need to examine this issue from the context of a cross-culture. A better understanding of cultural dissimilarities between hosts and guests at certain areas of destinations could improve tailored services and increase satisfaction for both the host and tourists. Existing studies related to expectation mainly undertaken from the tourist view. However, this study takes into consideration the expectation of service quality from tourists’ perspectives as well as host community. This study aims to gain some understanding about the impacts of cross-cultural dissimilarities between hosts and tourists by measuring their mutual expectations. Survey data is collected from Perhentian and Redang Islands, Malaysia. Two sample groups were involved in the study: host and tourists (Malay, Chinese, English and European). This study adopted two methods - the Mann-Whitney U-test and the Principal Components Analysis (PCA). The findings of this study demonstrate that mutual expectations between hosts and guests diverge across the cultural groups. This study contributes to the existing literatures related to service quality and highlights the importance of cultural differences in providing better quality tourism services particularly to island tourists in Malaysia and elsewhere. .
Highlights
Malaysia is blessed with abundant natural resources, including attractive small island destinations
The aim of this study is to investigate the cultural differences between tourists and host communities in small island settings and the potential influences of culture on their mutual expectation
Previous literatures emphasized on popular destinations and less studies have been done on small islands
Summary
Malaysia is blessed with abundant natural resources, including attractive small island destinations. Island tourism is attractive to the long haul and potentially colder mid latitude markets of Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand Visitors from these long haul markets significantly indicate cultural differences from the local community, whom they have a close contact in small island settings. There was a research that compared customer expectations across different cultures [14] Demographic profiles of those customers were studied to reflect the variance in expectations of service quality. Most studies of tourist expectations are based on measurement of service quality [16], mix-matched expectations in tourism [13] and demand expectations in the tourism industry [12]. The primary objective of this study is to investigate the impacts of cross-cultural differences between host and tourist communities as measured by their mutual expectations
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