PROPOSING A RESEARCH MODEL OF DESTINATION LOYALTY: THE CASE OF GASTRONOMIC TOURISM IN MALAYSIA

Abstract

Malaysia is among the popular countries in Asia and the Asia Pacific to be visited by foreign tourists. Recently, the number of international tourist arrivals and receipts in Malaysia show an unstable movement and decreasing pattern from year 2010 to 2019. This situations indicate a problem in terms of destination loyalty because loyal tourists can facilitate the destination to increase tourist arrivals through their repeat visit to the existing destination and recommending the destination to the others such as families and friends. Malaysia is resided with multi-racial residents, which makes it rich with gastronomic resources. Therefore, tourism management in Malaysia should takes advantages of its gastronomic resources to enhance loyalty among tourists. Hence, this study intends to propose a new research framework to enhance destination loyalty among tourists for gastronomic tourism. This framework comprises three latent constructs: food related motivation, food satisfaction and destination loyalty. This model is proposed to be tested among international tourists visiting Malaysia. Therefore, three direct effects and one indirect effect are proposed in this study.