Risks perceived by Mainland Chinese tourists towards Southeast Asia destinations: A fuzzy logic model

Abstract

Tourist risk is a barrier for tourism expansion. Southeast Asia destinations in Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore are usually arranged into single package tours for Mainland Chinese tourists. As such, exploring the tourists' risk factor weighting and comparing their perceived risk in these destinations are important for local and regional tourism development targeted for the Mainland Chinese tourist market. From the view of the Mainland Chinese tourists with higher education, Singapore is perceived as the safest destination, followed by Malaysia and Thailand. In terms of risk factor importance, the outcome shows that the seven safety components are in declining order as follows: law & order, hygiene, medical support, accommodation, sightseeing location, transportation and weather. In order to measure tourists' perceived risk quantitatively while considering evaluators' uncertainty of natural language description, this study employs an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method to determine the weight of various risk evaluation criteria and applies fuzzy logic to make evaluators' subjective judgments.