The use of media to promote muslim friendly hospitality services in Malaysia

Abstract

In recent years, the interest in Muslim friendly hospitality services (MFHS) seems to be a research topic among researchers. In mass communication, research on Islam as a subject of promotion has been widely done in prior research focused on how Islam been portrayed in tourism promotion in majority Muslim countries. Study on how media been used to promote MFHS in Malaysia is vital to understand how tourism organisation employed media to promote MFHS in Malaysia. With the advancement in communication technology, traditional media as a research subject has been left out in mass communication research with new research direction has been turned to the internet and its component such as social media platform. However, little research has been done to understand how social media platforms had been employed to promote MFHS in Malaysia and explore tourism organisation’s performance in promoting MFHS in Malaysia. As a travel stakeholder, the tourism organisation should anticipate and improve their performance while using media as a promotion tool. Previous literature suggests that media use among tourism organisations was limited with focused information on Islam in tourism hovering around related Islamic services and products, Islamic art and architecture and Islam as a religion for the Malay community. Hence, this study explored strategies use by tourism organisation in social media; in this study, Facebook has been selected as a social media under study since it is the most popular social media platform among Malaysian. Content analysis method has been applied to examine tourism organisations Facebook post. A total of 416 posts from four MFHS tourism organisation have been analysed according to content analysis procedure that later identified three main themes in examining the content of the Facebook post; post frequency, design and content strategies, and online engagement. Aside from that, this study applied the extrapolation method to explore differences/similarities between tourism organisation. Content analysis resulted in; overall tourism organisation uses of Facebook were still moderate, especially by government tourism organisation. Facebook has been used mainly to provide information on Islamic products and services with little effort to interact and engage with users. Consequently, it left a post with little engagement by a user that later reflects the total number of page followers. This study also discovered that traveller had been involved in providing content in the tourism organisation Facebook page. They have been hired as a freelance contributor, or their story has been picked and shared in tourism organisation official Facebook. This trend was growing among private tourism organisation but has been left out by government tourism organisation. On the other hand, this thesis also studied media content’s impact on people’s awareness and attitude. A total of 207 respondents that use media as a source to gain information on MFHS has been selected after data screening. Three dimensions have been identified during Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), and Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) has been applied to predicts the relationship between content on people awareness and attitude. Overall, respondents agreed that credibility, relevancy, and legitimacy significantly influence awareness and attitude, while timeliness and engagement do not significantly influence user awareness and attitude.