Establishing Shariah-compliance hotel characteristics from a Muslim needs perspective - Theory and Practice in Hospitality and Tourism Research - page 527

articles written that acknowledge the underdevel-
oped concept of SCH (Henderson, 2009; Rosen-
berg & Choufany, 2009; Wilkinson, 2007).
The literature provides several proposals on
guidelines and constructs of SCH. However,
the agreement on a common set of construct or
guideline does not appear to exist (Abdul Hamid,
2010). Most of the authors provide guidelines
that narrowly focused to Shariah-compliant serv-
ices offered by hotels thus fail to see the actual
needs of Muslim guests and ignore the manage-
ment aspect of SCH. Perhaps, this is due to the
scholars' background where none of them are
Muslim and most of the writers stay at non-
Muslim countries. In addition, the scope of
previous researches only limited to Middle East
area that consists of minority Islamic population
(Henderson, 2010). Since, the SCH guidelines are
conceptual, an empirical research on how hotels
practice Shariah-compliance concept is required
to provide a strong guideline for future reference
by hotel internationally.
Therefore, it is important to understand what
has been practiced by Malaysia hotels in terms of
Islamic services to develop a better picture on this
matter and give insights on the practice of SCH at
the Muslim populated country. This paper report
initial findings of SCH practices and contributes
to the Malaysia hospitality industry by providing
information on the implementation of SCH by
Malaysia hotel.

However, according to many researchers, the
main factor that impact the SCH development is
the absence of SCH standard and requirements
(Abdul Hamid, 2010; Birchall, 2009; Henderson,
2010; Rosenberg & Choufany, 2009; Siddiqui,
2011). Henderson (2010), Rosenberg and Chou-
fany (2009) and Birchall (2009) mentioned that
without an established standard of SCH, the prac-
tice of SCH will be different from one hotel to
another (Anonymous, 2009).

3 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

This preliminary study adopted in-depth, open-
ended interviews through snowball sampling to
understand the practice and generate a set of SCH
attributes in Malaysia. Snowball sampling was
applied as the population is small and specialized.
The interview process began with two experts in
Malaysia's hospitality industry who later recom-
mended other experts to provide more information
regarding the subject matter. In total six experts
from diverse background were interviewed. The
interviews were recorded, transcribed and catego-
rized within a week, based on interview questions.
The thematic analysis was employed to identify
relevant themes after examination of the data.
The respondents were asked about their opinion
on issues in implementing SCH. Several issues
emerged and discussed in the next section.

2.3 The growth of SCH
Several factors have contributed to the growth of
Shariah compliant hotels. These include: 1) The
increase efforts to develop tourism industry among
Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) coun-
tries and enhance travelling within its members;
2) The attractiveness of high spending and lucra-
tive market of the Middle East (ME) travelers
that sparks the interest of many hotels to provide
Islamic services to fulfill their needs; 3) Strin-
gent security measures and difficulties to get visa
approval in the West shifted the ME travelers to the
East and increase demand on Islamic services in
tourism industry; 4) Halal revolution has created
high awareness by Muslim on their religious needs
and it creates an opportunity to serve the Muslim
tourist untapped needs; 5) The growth of Islamic
banking and finance increase investors' interest to
invest in Halal products and services such as SCH;
and 6) The fast growing Muslim market is esti-
mated at USD$500 billion annually and Halal mar-
ket worth USD$2.1 trillion in the world and this
increase the popularity and visibility of the SCH
(Abdul Hamid, 2010; Henderson, 2009; Hender-
son, 2010; Kaaki, 2008; Zailani, et al., 2011).

4 DISCUSSION

4.1 Government regulation
From the interviews conducted, several issues were
highlighted by the respondents including the gov-
ernment regulation, the application to get Halal
certificate, and the Shariah-compliant standard
hotel. The encouragement for hotel to obtain
Halal certificate for its restaurant or food and bev-
erage outlet is seen as a good one at the right time.
Recently, Malaysian government enforce the regu-
lation that only hotel with Halal certificate for res-
taurant can cater the government functions. The
effect of this is tremendous as many hotels were
forced to or would like to obtain Halal certificate
for having their restaurant certified Halal enable
them to host government events.

4.2 Halal certificate
Delayed process to obtain Halal certificate by
JAKIM, a body that is responsible to grant Halal
certification in Malaysia, lower the motivation of
hotels to obtain Halal certification. Moreover, the