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destination image of Perak
A.M.F. Wahab, M.A.A. Bashir, M.D. Darson & M.H. Zamri
Universiti Teknologi MARA, Penang, Malaysia
ABSTRACT: The importance of tourist destination's image is universally acknowledged since it affects
individual's subjective perception and consequent behavior as well as destination choice. Images signifi-
cantly affected tourists' behavior, starting from their mental constructions about destination attributes to
travel decision making process. In line with that notion, this study aims to investigate Singaporean tourists'
perspective as well as expectation towards destination image of Perak. Using Perak as contextual setting,
150 Singaporean tourists were successfully surveyed. Findings showed that Singaporean tourists were
slightly disagreed with certain quality attributes of destination image in Perak with shopping facilities and
safety condition image recorded the lowest and highest score respectively. Apart from that, destination
image was found significantly affecting expectation formation in tourists mind. Finally, implications and
recommendations for the state government and the local tourism service providers were emphasized.
Keywords
:
Destination image, expectation, shopping facilities, safety
1 INTRODUCTION
With a mission to promote tourism and foreign
investment to the state especially from Singapore,
State Government of Perak has signed a five-year
strategic collaboration with Firefly, and one of the
focuses is to enable international air connection
between Sultan Azlan Shah Airport in Ipoh, Perak
and Changi International Airport in Singapore
(Firefly, 2010). This action were driven by the fact
that Singapore is the biggest tourism spender from
South East Asia region, sitting in the 11th place in
the world ranking of international tourism spend-
ers in the year 2012, jumped two places from 2011
(United Nation World Tourism Organization,
2013). According to the same source, an astonish-
ing RM69.4 billion total expenditure worldwide
has been recorded by tourists from this island
country in the year 2012. It indicated that this
targeted group of tourists has strong capability in
spending during travelling and some consideration
should be taken to cater this valuable market.
In addition, Perak state in collaboration with
Tourism Malaysia Singapore has geared an effort
to tap the growing number of Singaporean tourists
to Malaysia (Sgtravellers.com, 2010). The effort
showed an impressive result when Singaporean
tourists arrival to Perak rose 700 percent to 72,000
between January and August 2012 (The Borneo
Post, 2012). However, the percentage of Singapo-
rean tourists to Perak is only 0.553 percent from
13.01 million of their total arrivals to Malaysia in
2012.
The effort to develop a positive image of the tour-
ist destination in target markets' mind is crucial as
it will help the destination to reach its real competi-
tive advantage (Gartner, 1994). In line with that,
Baloglu and Mangaloglu (2001) have contended
that destinations primarily compete based on their
perceived images relative to other competitors in
the marketplace. Identifying images of tourist des-
tination will help tourism marketers to promote
their destination efficiently in the marketplace
(Leisen, 2001) and it will significantly assist iden-
tification of destination strengths and weaknesses
(Chen & Uysal, 2002). In line with that statement,
it is argued that tourism destination image is one
of the key challenges in tourism study nowadays,
since it is an essential component of tourism des-
tination marketing that influences tourists' behav-
ior by stimulating multiple creative activities and
experiences (Nicoletta & Servidio, 2012).
A review of tourist arrivals revealed that Singa-
porean remains the leading group of international
tourist to Malaysia with 13.37 million arrivals in
2011 (Tourism Malaysia, 2012). In year 2012, tour-
ists from this country made up 52 percent from
25.03 million total international tourist arrivals
in Malaysia. With this positive indication, many
states in Malaysia including Perak are competing
each other in attract the neighboring country tour-
ist by strengthening their destination images.
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